HAS THE LEFT BLOWN ITS BIG CHANCE?
by Andy Beckett - The Guardian, 17 August
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/aug/17/left-politics-capitalism-recession
It is a rare sunny summer morning and I am on the bus from Stoke Newington to Bloomsbury in central London. In these old, slightly earnest parts of the capital, leftwing politics runs deep: from Karl Marx writing in the British Library to communes in the 70s to today’s dogged socialist flyposters. This morning’s bus ride does not disappoint. Seated in front of me, en route to Marxism 2009, the pre-eminent British gathering of the international radical left, are a clean-cut man and woman in their early 20s. He is wearing a crisp new T-shirt that reads “Revolución Bolivarana”. She has a large rucksack. They are speaking German, but the word “socialism” recurs.
The papers today are full of the recession as usual. On the Today programme, David Cameron has been talking about emergency cuts in government spending, and a union leader has been fiercely defending the wages of public sector workers. It could almost be the heady days of the mid-70s, when capitalism seemed to struggle for breath and all political bets appeared to be off.
At Euston station, the couple get off the bus. I follow them, past the looming tower of Network Rail headquarters – once the chaotic private-sector Railtrack, until it was nationalised – and into the complex of meeting rooms hosting Marxism 2009. But the atmosphere inside comes as something of a shock. It is the final, supposedly climactic day of the conference. The speakers are reasonably intriguing and diverse – the radical playwright David Edgar, the dissident Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn, the rising young union boss Mark Serwotka. And yet, Marxism 2009 feels little different from most such leftwing summits in Britain over the last quarter century. The corridors are animated rather than feverish. Attendees greet each other as old friends and comrades rather than eager new converts. The pavement outside has moderately busy stalls for the usual causes: opposition to Israeli land occupations, opposition to the British National Party.
At one table, a weatherbeaten man sits alone selling DVDs of “activist news” and collecting names and addresses. The sky above turns overcast, then steadily darkens. It starts to pour, but he does not move. As the rain soaks his hair and jacket, he sits still and erect, impressively defiant but a bit absurd. The ink on his list of names starts to run.
The last year should have been a happy one for the left. The great global lab experiment in unfettered finance capitalism has blown up. Bankers have become pariahs. Taxes on the rich have gone up. The pages of the financial press have had a frequent air of panic. New Labour has fallen out of love with the free market. Above all, the rightwing economic and political ideas first popularised by Margaret Thatcher in the 70s have, finally, lost their air of impregnability.
“These are the best circumstances to make the left case we’ve known for an awful long time,” says Neal Lawson, head of the leftwing pressure group Compass, “since way back before 1979, since back to the 30s.” Geoff Mulgan, the former Labour strategist and a longtime observer of the left, agrees: “This is a moment that should be incredibly propitious for the left. Capitalism is collapsing. You don’t get more propitious than that.”
There is also the widening recognition that free-market countries have deep social as well as economic problems. Earlier this year Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, at the time almost unknown outside academia, published The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. Its findings about the failings of the most fiercely capitalist countries, such as Britain and the US, in everything from obesity to violent crime to mental health, received overwhelming acclaim in both the rightwing and liberal press. Wilkinson says he is now “absolutely deluged with invitations to speak: to religious groups, to civil servants, to government”. In academia he senses an intellectual tide running leftwards: “In a lot of different subjects there’s a move towards a fundamental recognition of how social people are. In neurology, epidemiology, social psychology, child development, there’s lots of evidence that humans do better if they’re collaborative.”
And yet, in Britain and most comparable countries the left is not thriving. Quite the opposite. The Brown government’s mild tilt to the left has made it no more popular. At the European elections in June, left-leaning parties, whether in office or opposition, cautious or militant, were trounced across the continent. Votes went instead to mainstream conservative parties or far right and anti- immigration groups. Over the summer the broader political debate, particularly in Britain, has shifted in the same direction: “The crisis of the financial markets has become a crisis of public spending – it’s incredible!” says Hilary Wainwright, editor of leftwing magazine Red Pepper. “Public servants are going to be scrutinised down to the last paperclip, while bankers are not going to be scrutinised down to the last million they have received from the government.”
Has the left missed its moment? The radical American writer Rebecca Solnit fears so. “It felt like last October [the peak of the banking panic] was the golden moment to put forward an alternative vision,” she says. “What’s been dismaying is that there has been so little coherent response from the left since.” Lawson wonders whether the sheer size of the political opportunity presented by the financial crisis has induced paralysis: “All our Christmases have come at once, but we don’t know what to do about it.”
At Marxism 2009, the best-attended session of the morning is “Where is the radical left going?”. The main speaker is Alex Callinicos, for decades now one of the key theorists in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the tirelessly agitating British fringe party that has organised the conference. In the airless main hall, in front of a stage backdrop reading “Capitalism Isn’t Working!”, Callinicos, concise and dapper in a black shirt, delivers a strikingly downbeat speech. “The forward march of the radical left in Europe has been halted,” he says. “We’re in a situation that is in a sense quite problematic . . . It’s not a uniform picture of stagnation or retreat. The left bloc in Portugal got 10% of the vote in the European elections . . . But the ruling classes are desperately grabbing bits of Keynesianism. So a left economic policy based on Keynesianism, when Keynesianism has entered the mainstream, isn’t very powerful.”
This theme – that governments everywhere have borrowed the left’s traditional tools for taming capitalism to deal with the financial crisis, thus stealing the left’s clothes – is repeated often at the conference. It is met with looks of resignation but also grim satisfaction from the audience. The infinite deviousness of “the ruling classes” and the immense difficulty of the left’s task are a given in these halls. In 2004, Solnit published a much-praised book, Hope in the Dark: the Untold History of People Power, challenging the instinctive pessimism of many leftists. “A lot of activists,” she wrote, “specialise in disappointment.” She adds now: “Despair is a black leather jacket that everyone looks good in. Hope is a frilly pink dress that exposes your knees.”
It is quite hard to imagine Jon Cruddas in a frilly pink dress. The prominent leftwing Labour MP for the raw suburb of Dagenham in east London is all shirtsleeves and strong handshakes when we meet in Westminster. But he is one British socialist who still sees the recession as an ongoing political opportunity. Crisis on the left or not, his own trajectory seems upward: elected as an MP in 2001, he won the most first-preference votes in the Labour deputy leadership contest only six years later (Harriet Harman won via second preferences), and is spoken of by some as a potential party leader if Labour, as is quite possible, moves truly leftward after a general election defeat.
“The 15th of September 2008, the day Lehman Brothers went bust, could be the day the world turned,” he begins with characteristic confidence. “The whole politics of Blair and Cameron looks like the product of more benign times.” Cruddas, unlike some on the left, supported the subsequent bank bail-outs – “you couldn’t let the whole system collapse” – and does not think the apparent amelioration of the financial crisis that has followed means a return to economic and political business as usual. “This is the early knockings of this crisis. You’ve still got trillions of pounds of debt around. The assumption in here” – he nods impatiently towards the House of Commons – “is that we tinker with this economic system, and then go back to 60 consecutive quarters of growth. But out in the country people know different. There is no economic status quo any more. There is a hunger for political ideas. I helped do an e-book on the crisis. Cost £250 to produce, put it on the web, 50,000 copies gone – bang. There is a space for a populist left politics – around [opposition to] ID cards and Trident, around taxes, tax justice – that wasn’t there a year ago.”
But Cruddas says people wanting this politics to crystallise will have to be patient. Rightwing ideas have been so dominant for so long in western politics and economics that they may only slowly loosen their grip. “This is going to take years. There was a long lag between the Wall Street Crash in ‘29 and the New Deal [the first effective left-of-centre response to it].” In the meantime, he warns, “There could be a different new form of politics, much more populist, dangerous, fascistic, like the BNP.” With only the faintest hint of ostentation, Cruddas, who has a philosophy PhD, quotes part of a famous passage by the Italian Marxist thinker of the 20s and 30s Antonio Gramsci: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
To less upbeat observers than Cruddas it is the left that displays “morbid symptoms”. Mulgan says: “A lot of the left literature feels like it’s just words, just rhetorical. [Groups such as] Compass don’t feel like they’re part of a real social movement. It’s very different from a generation ago.”
Until well into the Thatcher era, the left in Britain was a complete and vigorous political world. It had a mass membership through the unions and the Labour party. It had credibility and charismatic figures: even establishment papers such as the Times feared and sometimes respected Tony Benn or the National Union of Mineworkers. And it had potent ideas from the likes of Gramsci and Marx and Keynes. All of these elements have decayed since the 80s; but none so damagingly, especially in the light of the financial crisis, as the left’s thinking about the economy.
“The left just gave up on economics,” says the economist Paul Ormerod, who retains sympathy for the cause. “Marx and Keynes cast such long shadows. There was too much of the left saying, ‘It’s all there in the old masters.’” Marx died in 1883 and Keynes in 1946; by the 80s – some would say much earlier – the world economy had changed sufficiently to invalidate some of their ideas. Yet the left was more interested by then, Ormerod argues, in other issues such as race and gender and sexuality. Lawson agrees: “We’ve had a hollowed-out generation of economic thinkers.”
Since the 80s, Ormerod says, rightwing economists “have taken over in treasuries and central banks all over the world”. Western universities, too, have become production lines for rightwing economics graduates – and for graduates who do not even consider a complete faith in the free market to be a political position at all. Meanwhile, the left has suffered a broader crisis of confidence: as Lawson puts it, “We’ve had the intellectual stuffing knocked out of us – the fall of communism, the fall of postwar social democracy.”
By the early 21st century, even fresh and successful leftwing books such as Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine or Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri assumed that global capitalism was immensely strong, “in the midst of conquering its final frontiers” in Klein’s words. Most of the left, just like most other political schools of thought, did not see the great financial collapse of 2008 coming. Since the recession set in, the left has not been able to play what should have been its electoral trump card: “We told you so.”
Solnit considers this picture of universal leftwing retreat too bleak. She sees signs of radicalism in Barack Obama’s administration, for example on green issues. She points out that anti-globalisation and left-leaning environmental groups across the west remain energetic and creative, and that some have paid attention to economics. “I do feel like there are a lot of small alternatives out there: community agriculture, people living by barter, people living off the grid. That revolution is slow and incremental. It’s been going on since the 60s. That continues.” In Hope in the Dark, she criticises those who “expect . . . a punctual reaction” from the left to big political or economic events “and regard the lack of one as a failure”. The way politics works, she writes, “is more complicated than cause and effect”.
At Marxism 2009 there is the occasional reminder that leftwing politics still has potential. In the conference bookshop, for the most part a well-visited mausoleum of nostalgic volumes – Glorious Summer: Class Struggle in Britain 1972 – there is a brief, more forward-looking pamphlet on sale for £1. Visteon: How Workers Occupied and Won is an SWP account of the factory occupations in Northern Ireland and England this spring at the car component manufacturer Visteon. It is written in the usual overdone party style – “Now we have the template for resistance” – but suggests that the left’s response to the global slump may not be completely toothless.
In March, with the motor industry in free-fall, Visteon, a spin-off of Ford, abruptly closed its UK plants and sacked all its workers. Staff reportedly received “six minutes” to clear their lockers, and redundancy terms far inferior to those they had been promised when Ford created the company nine years earlier. Kevin Nolan, a Unite union official at the Visteon factory in Enfield in north London, was one of those fired.
“I’ve always been a middle-of-the-road working man,” he says. “I always voted Labour but I wouldn’t say I was too leftwing.” Yet the mass sackings radicalised him almost instantly. “I started thinking, we’ve got to come up with something. This was a corporation which had decided to use the recession to walk away. The initial plan was to ram a car through the main gates. Then we found a gate round the back of the factory open – no one knows the plant better than the worker – and we could just walk in.” Once inside, Nolan and between a third and two-thirds of the Enfield workforce (accounts vary) blocked up the entrances to the plant with plastic crates, climbed on to the roof and fire escape, and announced that they would occupy the premises until they were offered satisfactory redundancy terms.
Nolan and many of his colleagues had never been on strike, but they made beds out of cardboard on the chilly shopfloor and dug in. Local people, some with no connection to the plant, brought them food and blankets. Members of the SWP arrived. “I said to them, ‘I used to think you were a bunch of nutcases,’” says Nolan. “But they were very, very helpful.” The Enfield occupation acquired a revolutionary tinge: “Don’t Need Politicians, Don’t Need Bosses, Workers Take Control,” read one placard prominent in the TV and web coverage.
The Visteon sit-ins led to pickets of Ford dealerships and the threat of walkouts at Ford factories. In May, after less than five weeks’ campaigning, the Visteon workers were granted redundancy payments close to what they had originally demanded.
Other British factory occupations have followed, most recently at the Vestas wind turbine plant on the Isle of Wight. But the ability of such well-publicised local episodes to restore a lasting momentum to the left is far from obvious. Over the last 20 years, there have been intermittent waves of leftwing militancy – the huge and vivid anti-globalisation protests of the 90s, for example – while the underlying political assumptions of Britain and similar western countries have continued to move rightwards. The modern left, its internal critics say, has become too fragmented, too utopian and divorced from how most people live. Wainwright asks: “What is the underlying social force that’s going to be the basis of the left? In the mid-20th century it was the factory worker and the union member. There are far fewer of them now.” Solnit says: “I don’t see the networks in which great ideas circulate.”
Other people think the left has just run out of ideas. “The feeling is still around that the left doesn’t have any solutions,” says Wilkinson. “Actually, our society is full of alternative ways of organising things” – he cites the success of the Co-operative Bank, built on ethical investments – “but the left desperately needs a developed ideology . . . an analysis of society.” When capitalism had its last great crisis of confidence in the 70s, the British right had a set of remedies and a whole alternative worldview – later called Thatcherism – ready and waiting, decades in the making. Neal Lawson refers provocatively but also enviously to the early Thatcherites’ political and intellectual “brilliance”.
This time, perhaps the real challenge to the tottering status quo is not from the left at all. “The greens share a lot of the ideas of the left,” says Mulgan, “but they are not in coalition with it, they are suspicious of it.” Climate change is almost certain to make environmentalism more powerful. “The dominant sectors of the economy in 10 or 20 years’ time,” Mulgan predicts, will not be banking and property but “environmental services, health, education. This will be good for the left.”
Maybe. Yet the left used to aim to change society rather than wait for society to change in its favour. For the bankers, who seemed to be facing near-extinction less than a year ago, the prospect of much more slowly losing their dominance over western economies to Mulgan’s caring capitalists may not seem such a bad deal.
At the closing rally of Marxism 2009, with all the seats eagerly taken but the air stale as ever in the main hall, the SWP’s national organiser Martin Smith interrupts his speech to read a short poem by the radical American writer Langston Hughes called Dream Deferred. It is an odd but stirring interlude, at least at first. The hall goes completely quiet; the heavyset, middle-aged Smith switches from bare-fisted rhetoric to the ambiguity – half defeatism, half defiance – of Hughes’ verse: “What happens to a dream deferred?/. . . Maybe it just sags/Like a heavy load/Or does it explode?” But Smith rushes too quickly through the words and the moment is gone.
Given that the `left’ was in government when the crisis struck its hardly surprising that the tories, UKIP and the fascists have been the first to benefit. Of course, the socialist left’s chance will arrive as the true depth of the bankruptcy of British capitalism becomes increasingly apparent along with the scale and depth of the assault that the right has planned for the working class and huge swathes of what we currently think of as the middle class. The question will then be `can socialists take that chance or will they be thwarted and a massive defeat inflicted on workers by a combination of sectarian wreckers and opportunist liquidators. We will find out.
Comment by Thoughts — 17 August, 2009 @ 8:05 pm
I thought it was a really vacuous and boring article. I think there are real discussions to be had - I think the issue on left unity again is vacuous and boring because it isn’t about “left unity” whatever that means but how do we orientate to the working class and those who are coming to conclusions that capitalism doesn’t work - there are many activists out there but “Socialists” don’t always orientate towards them. I think there is a wider orientation on justice, equity and fairness- politics of food, environment, animal rights, feminism, community activism etc
Comment by cat — 17 August, 2009 @ 8:12 pm
I thought it was vacuous nonsense.
Any analysis of the events of the past 12 - 18 months that doesn’t mention the wave of workplace occupations, the community activism or indeed the actual electoral gains that the CWI and SWP made in Ireland is either ignorant or deliberately lying.
Just as importantly, the mass movement in support of the Palestinians that has convulsed the UK’s educational institutions from Scotland to London and beyond is not even mentioned.
I’ve been a socialist activist for over 30 years, events never unfold to a timetable, societies are made up of people not robots.
Just when you think it’s safe to take a holiday the people decide to get stroppy.
All of those who have been involved in the workplace occupations, the environmental actions, strikes and anti racist activity have succeeded in defending a common line in the sand, now is the time to bring it together in a new left offensive.
Comment by Eddie Truman — 17 August, 2009 @ 8:43 pm
The point surely that Andy Beckett was making was that these are extremely favourable conditions for the outside left yet it remains weaker than ever before. A couple of workplace occupations hardly disguise this self-evident fact.
A Labour Government that has chucked away getting on for 200,000 members. A Labour Government that has disappointed all but its most loyal supporters. A Labour Government that has revealed the very real limitations of parliamentary cretinism.
And then with its political reputation nosediving a global meltdown of neoliberal economics kicks in. A popular common sense around nationalising banks, public ownership of key utlitities, a new green deal has considerable potential. Yet as an electoral force and membership organisation the left is absolutely nowhere. Its impact outside of its own severely depleted ranks marginal. It is the Far Right BNP that can boast over 50 councillors, a GLA member, two MEPs, not to mention UKiP too.
It should give nobody any delight in admitting to this state of defeat of the outside left, but to pretend a couple of workplace occupations signifies some kind of significant revival. And theres no point blaming the electoral system either, outside of Scotland no outside left party has succeed in winning seats in PR elections, to the GLA or European Parliament.
Yes of course this defeat is no excuse for retreat or resignation but until we face up to the scale of the defeat, which is what Andy Beckett at least began to portray it will be more of the same and getting nowhere, fast.
Mark P
Comment by Mark P — 17 August, 2009 @ 8:58 pm
#4 Mark, I agree that there has to be an honest appraisal of where we are at but honesty means documenting the positive side and for me there are many more now in August 2009 than there were in January.
Comment by Eddie Truman — 17 August, 2009 @ 9:18 pm
On that there is no need to differ, though such an ‘activism audit’ would need to take a longer term base of comparison and also consider the scale of possibilities not to mention measuring the rise of the Far Right vs the state of the outside Left. It would in all probability be a pretty depressing picture!
Mark P
Comment by Mark P — 17 August, 2009 @ 9:31 pm
yes I thought it was dull, I went to the Latin American Workers Association on saturday via the cleaners campaign they put up a huge fight, I think while may be the left may have blown it, the article is too focussed on the SWP and Compass…
Comment by Derek Wall — 17 August, 2009 @ 9:33 pm
I don’t think these are exceptionally favourable times for the left, so the article’s assumption that they should be and the left has marvellous potential it is failing to tap is wrong to start with.
The left, at least in the metropolitan imperialist countries, is still being pulled down by the undertow from 1989-91. Even the SWP can’t wave a magic wand and say “Communism is dead, long live socialism” and not have its prospects as limited by those events as everyone else’s on the left.
Economic crisis in the 1930s helped the far right more than anyone else, despite the existence of some mass CPs in the world and the presence of the Soviet Union. Post-USSR, it is simply even easier than it was in 1933 for the far right to blame the usual suspects in an economic crisis and reap a reward.
Comment by Nechayev — 17 August, 2009 @ 9:40 pm
#4 `A Labour Government that has revealed the very real limitations of parliamentary cretinism.’
That’s a good thing isn’t it?
I think you go to far with the defeat attitude. The situation is only just beginning to unfold. However, that the `outside’ left is weak and has been unable to take proper advantage of the collapse of New Labour I agree. This is partly its own fault and partly the fault of objective circumstances. But there have been hugely important discussions on the socialist left especially on this blog in the past couple of years basically since the attempt to destroy Respect and continuing through the Israel/Palestine question, the Lindsey strikes, factory occupations and now how to fight fascism. There will, I’m sure, be more important discussions to come on the forthcoming elections and other big events. Let’s face it, it has been necessary for the Marxist left not only to take on the ultra-conservative, anti-working class, bureaucratic clique and their `left’ and right apologists that dominate the labour party and also the trade unions but at the same time to start to loosen the stranglehold of the ultra-left sects on `real’ socialism and their self-serving mini bureaucracies which formed during the long years of the Cold War.
Socialism is the only reasonable response to what is turning out to be a crisis of unprecedented magnitude and reason, if we fight for it reasonably, will prevail. The working class will eventually come to power if the left makes it happen and it really only needs to want it to happen. Those who don’t want it to happen will continue on their sectarian or opportunist ways but reason will grow.
Comment by Thoughts — 17 August, 2009 @ 9:42 pm
“Socialism is the only reasonable response to what is turning out to be a crisis of unprecedented magnitude and reason, if we fight for it reasonably, will prevail. The working class will eventually come to power if the left makes it happen and it really only needs to want it to happen. Those who don’t want it to happen will continue on their sectarian or opportunist ways but reason will grow.”
This makes the assumption, common among socialists, that people, including the working class, are rational. But what if they are not? Fash have often made headway by appealing to emotion, often irrational.
Years ago, I was travelling on an overnight coach. I overheard a youngish man who seemed a bit learning-disabled talking. He was talking to someone else but it was nearly a monologue. He just went on and on. I remember he said he had to get back home to sign on as part of his bail conditions at a police station. He also said he was out of work and it was the fault of “asylum seekers”.
He might not have had the mental technology to register to vote, but, if he and people like him overcome that hurdle, just multiply him by 900,000 and you have two BNP seats in Europe.
Comment by Nechayev — 17 August, 2009 @ 10:08 pm
In my opinion, the article is somewhat unfocussed and confused to say the least about who and what it defines as “Left”.
It omits to even mention, for example, the anti war movement and the fact that 15th February 2003 (a day of truly global and historic proportions when lest we forget over 15 million marched throughout the World against the advent of the imperialist war in and invasion of Iraq ) witnessed the biggest political demonstration this country has ever experienced as well as already mentioned the unprecedented protests in solidarity with the Palestinan people earlier this year during the bloody and barbaric Israeli slash and burn slaughter operation in Gaza backed by the imperialist countries.
I have just come from the Guardian comments page having just spent a few hours wading through a deluge of comments.Suffice to say the comments board in relation to the article is at times interesting reading for those with the time and inclination to find out what some people define and see as “the LEFT”.
Equally there’s a mountain of dross to sift through but equally there are some very positive Left contributions and insights being made.It’s an area for political debate and discussion and the opportunity is there to intervene.
Comment by Fleabite — 17 August, 2009 @ 10:30 pm
A capitalist crisis would provide a great opportunity for the radical left if the radical left had a credible alternative system that it could propose. But - let’s face it - it hasn’t. We have a critique of capitalism, but we do not have a concrete, plausible, alternative way of organising production and distribution that would clearly lead to a better outcome. The fact that capitalism is bad does not in itself make “socialism” - whatever we mean by that - a better option. Unless and until we can show that we have something better to offer, the radical left will be in no position to benefit from capitalist crises, however bad they get. It is not just a matter of the “reasonableness” of a rational, planned economy producing for people not profit, but of demonstrating its feasibility. People are sceptical, and not without reason.
Comment by Francis King — 17 August, 2009 @ 10:35 pm
Those commenters who agree with the thrust of the article, or similar councils of “glass half empty”, have a duty to then explain: so what does that mean we should do? If the answer is “sit around and gaze at our navels”, then they can and should be ignored. Certainly let’s look unflinchingly at the facts, but that must lead to counsels of practical action.
I 100% agree that people are not rational. That’s what Marx meant by “the ideology of the ruling class is the ideology of society”. But also, the liberation of the working class must be the act of the working class. So how is this circle squared? If the answer is that it can’t be, then we’re all wasting our time and we should go and take up gardening or something.
Comment by Daphne — 17 August, 2009 @ 11:04 pm
@12: “We have a critique of capitalism, but we do not have a concrete, plausible, alternative way of organising production and distribution that would clearly lead to a better outcome.”
Tell that to the Chinese and Vietnamese!
Comment by little black sister — 17 August, 2009 @ 11:06 pm
@14. Do you seriously believe that it is the state-owned sector that is leading the rapid development of the Chinese and Vietnamese economies? Alas no, it is those economies’ ability to provide cheap labour power that is driving their rapid economic expansion. I don’t think you’d have much success selling that model over here.
Comment by Francis King — 17 August, 2009 @ 11:19 pm
Little Black Sister - are you suggesting that China and Vietnam are some kind of workers paradises??!?
Comment by Steve — 17 August, 2009 @ 11:20 pm
“Yet the left was more interested by then, Ormerod argues, in other issues such as race and gender and sexuality”
You’ve got it in one. Our generation knew better. We promoted the politics of a 1970s/80s campus - ‘alternative’ politics of race, sex, sexuality. To us the naive, politically incorrect, unreconstructed views of actual working men and women were something of an embarrassment (mea culpa - memories of talking with my steelworker uncles during holidays, the first member of the family ever to go to university, wondering why they weren’t better socialists - like me). But the old working class was fast disappearing as the Thatcher years saw the disappearance of so much of our industry - a process which has continued unchanged under the Blair regime.
This process was gradual, not sudden. But when Clause 4 went, so did the Old Labour soul and morality.
Now when Labour supporters talk about ‘working class’ or ‘working people’ - they are most often referring to NON-working people - the underclass - unemployed and unemployable despite the boom years.
The idea (and ideal) of the nation vanished around the same time as the idea (and ideal) of nationalisation. After all, there’s no such thing as a British nation any more, is there ?
This change of focus on the left, when middle-class university lefties, appalled at the Thatcherite hegemony, gave up on the British working class (too many of them were voting for her) and looked around for some other “other” to bring about radical social change, was a tremendous boon to capital. Capitalists soon realised that fighting against “racism, sexism and homophobia” had nothing but positives for them.
Compliant labour via the influx of women into the workforce (a few excellent exceptions like Grunwick and Gate Gourmet, both involving Asian women). Fewer babies as more women work ? Fewer babies means a smaller labour pool. And a smaller labour pool means - gasp - higher wages. Oh dear. What can we do to keep profits up and costs down ?
Of course - the fight against racism. Obviously, if it’s racist to object to some immigration, then it’s racist to object to ANY immigration at all. We can import as many people as we like - the politicians can feel groovy and multicultural while we get the cheap labour. It’s a win for everyone (except the working class already here, whose wages are screwed down, but who cares about them ?)
And that’s the Faustian compact between capital and “Labour” which we’re seeing now. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, the English working class recedes into the darkness. They have suffered in every respect by their association with the British Labour Party.
PS I’ll be at the exciting new ‘Feudalism 2009′ conference (or ‘jirga’) in Kandahar.
Comment by Laban Tall — 18 August, 2009 @ 12:17 am
I think there are a number of good points in seeral of the posts here and as funny as it may sound both the ‘pessimists’ and ‘optimists’ are both wrong in part and right in part.
In a longer term historical sense this is still an awful time objectively for the working class left as we are not yet over the defeats of the 1980s.
Yes there have been some chinks of light of late and including the STW movement and they must be continually fanned and developed and remembered but they have not turned into a new upturn in working class struggle.
As in the 1930s it is the right who are benefitting and the left has not concrete alternative as the birth and collpase of Stalinism have turned socialism into a dirty word, tarred it with totalitarianism and dis-orientated the left the world over. I fear this will last a long, long time. Young people have either not heard of socialism or when they do it is taught/discussed/explained in school, by the media and by the establishment as I have just described above.
There is only one thing and one thing only that will in large part potentially help us get over this and that is a huge long-term wave of class struggle by our side.
Consequently, we have to do every little thing we can to fan any sparks of resistance and rebuild a political working clas left-wing culture in a way that activists did during the 19th century new unionism period and the period from the 1960s-1970s.
How long it will take and where it will go nobody can know.
Its going to be a long-term re-building project that has already began ( I would post-Seattle).
All we can do is struggle and
Comment by pego — 18 August, 2009 @ 12:44 am
There has for a long time been a crisis in working class politics, - a profound crisis for the labour movement and for socialism. (But don’t blame this on the fact that socialists took up the necessary fights against racism, sexism and homophobia - like the last poster seems to do at no. 17!). The central problem was the inability of the labour movement to adapt to the new conditions of the class struggle in the last quarter of the twentieth century .
Traditional Social Democratic politics fitted the phase of ‘organised capitalism’ (or state monopoly capitalism) - a model that flourished around the world in different forms in the mid twentieth century but then began to break up alongside the crisis of capitalism between 1968 and 1973. Capital soon formulated its response to its crisis - the advance of neoliberal globalisation, or what we once called ‘Thatcherism’. However, the traditional, conservative and nationalistic politics of social democracy and Stalinism were unable to respond.
We all know the history. Domestically the syndicalism and sectionalism of the British Trades Union movement was no match for Thatchers political and organised class war offensive, which mobilised the full powers of the state and the social alliances around the ruling class to crush the miners, spending more than on the Falklands War! In response, the Trades Union leaders stood by and failed to mobilise the necessary solidarity strike action across society that would match the determination of Thatcher. Then the Labour Party responded by totally capitulating ideologically and adopting Thatcherism or neoloberlism as its own creed for itself! At the same time, the centrally planned system of state organised capitalism in the Soviet Union (once the most advanced part of the world system at its mid twentieth century zenith) was unable to match the globalised networked economies that ‘western’ neoliberalism was now discovering. Social Democratic and Stalinist ideas finally disintegrated, removing the main ideological glue from an already defeated and decomposing working class. The end result of all this was ‘new labour’ and now the current reality of an exhausted and discredited rightwing labour government facing the beginning of a profound and protracted global crisis of capital.
Yes, rightwing and nationalistic ideas will find resonance in this situation. But capital has long burst the bounds of its nationally organised social democratic forms, and gains its enhanced power over the working class from ever more globalised relations. It can only be successfully confronted by another globalised class. The working class is ever more international - through migration and globalisation. Paradoxically, this appears as its current weakness. The current battles for the heart and soul of the working class over racism and xenophobia represent a conscious recognition of this key factor in working class recomposition.
Key to transforming this situation, however, are not only battles over racism and nationalism. As we have witnessed at Vestas on the Isle of Wight - the workforce of a previously un-unionised factory in a conservative area can rise to significant heights of militancy and class consciousness very quickly if they take action for themselves. The tactic of occupation can sometimes now make sense in the face of job losses. Furthermore, it represents a new horizon of possibility, overcoming the associations that previous tactics of simple sectional strikes have with defeat - a memory stretching back to what became the great defeat of 1984-85.
Visteon and Vestas on their own have a limited (but growing) impact. But what if a site the size of Corus Steelworks with thousands of workers went into occupation against job josses? What if there were several regional such actions simultaneously? It is not inconceivable to start to talk about ‘tipping points’ in the balance of class forces.
Of course part and parcel of such a fightback would be the development of a new political programme to transcend the failures of the past, of social democracy, economism and reformism - as well as of both stalinism and sectarianism.
One of the most significant new developments since the late twentieth century has been rise in consciousness about the environmental crisis. As capitalism proves unable to make the transition to a sustainable techno-economic base, other more cooperative social forms and forces must step in and take the lead. The vestas occupation represents the potential for a new counter-hegemonic alliance of environmentalism and trades unionism that can begin to challenge the logic of capital. Ecological socialist solutions must therefore become a key part of the new programme for the recomposition of the working class on a global scale - once more as a class for itself.
There are many other dimensions for this potential socialist renaissance that lie latent within our contemporary capitalist society: Capitalism relies on ever more cooperative forces of production - appropriating the ‘commons’ of scientific and academic knowledge for its ‘knowledge based economy’ or generating the possibility for the free flow and distribution of all knowledge, art, culture, entertainment via information technologies such as the internet. Marx’s original insights on the contradiction between capitalism’s increasing reliance on cooperative and socialised forces of production versus its dependance on their private appropriation grows more relevant as capitalism develops. The battles over these ‘commons’ therefore become more intense. For example, capitalists are currently attempts to stifle the potential of the free sharing of culture via file sharing through shutting down the sharing sites and imposing more rules of privatised intellectual property. But only this week it was reported that thousands of people were joining anew ‘pirate party’ for the UK to fight for the right to share against this privatising offensive (and also to fight against the surveillance, or database state) These are some of the new contours of the class struggle that the new programme must recognise and organise around.
Comment by Barry Kade — 18 August, 2009 @ 2:12 am
Didn’t Jon Cruddas vote for the invasion of Iraq? If so, doesn’t this really some up where the British left is at and has always been?
Comment by Saeed — 18 August, 2009 @ 7:18 am
Not really. Jon Cruddas is not the British left. In fact his left credentials are somewhat suspect, he only manages to appear ‘left’ in comparison to the neo-liberals that dominate New Labour.
Comment by Steve — 18 August, 2009 @ 8:04 am
“As in the 1930s it is the right who are benefitting and the left has not concrete alternative as the birth and collpase of Stalinism have turned socialism into a dirty word, tarred it with totalitarianism and dis-orientated the left the world over. I fear this will last a long, long time. Young people have either not heard of socialism or when they do it is taught/discussed/explained in school, by the media and by the establishment as I have just described above.”
Whether you loved or hated the USSR etc. socialism gained some credibility from the existence of states, some of them powerful ones, where the official ideology was socialism. Their absence is being felt now. The character I was describing on the bus might once have blamed “the bosses” for his plight. But instead, in keeping with the spirit of the times, it is “asylum seekers” that explain why he can’t get a job. Or “bloody foreigners”.
There are other ramifications. For example, that TV show “The Apprentice”, where potential recruits have to jump through hoops to prove their value to Alan Sugar. It is not a TV concept that would arise in a time of class consciousness.
Comment by Nechayev — 18 August, 2009 @ 9:07 am
Francis King makes some good points at 12 about the “radical Left” having a critique of capitalism but does not have a credible alternative to it which people would see as better and more beneficial.
However,I’m not quite sure about who or what is the radical left or who “we” are which are referred to.It’s all very complicated as there are still 57 varieties of Left.
Why they cant all DISCUSS their points of view from within one large party,learn to put aside their differences and agree to work together on what is possible and feasible under the present circumstance but there lies the rub.
The Left is so varied from reformist left to soft left to hard left to communist left to revolutionairy lefts to libertarian lefts to anarchist left etc etc
As has been said a thousand times and more until the left can “learn” to live with possibly the 80% that it actually agrees on and “learn” to put aside it’s differences or agree to differ then “we” will continue to be pissing in the wind as there is no “credibility” gained.
It does however require common sense and care, flexibility and creativity,awareness and intelligence and most important of all trust and cooperation.It aint rocket science!!
We all have something to offer,we have our strengths and weaknesses,we have a wealth of experience,talents and skills to offer……so lets develop them together.You never know it might actually be an enjoyable and learning process.
What’s more to learn to cooperate and actually work together in an transparent open and accountable democratic manner without getting wrapped up in stupid, bitter and hugely damaging, counter productive internal battles for “top down” control and overbearing influence as we witnessed in the insane blood splattered debacles within the Socialist Alliance,Respect and the Scottish Socialist party.
“We” are where we are for a reason, often of are own making.
It’s time to leeeeeeeeeeearn the lessons and mistakes of the past and learn them well never to be repeated again.
As has been posted up here a few days ago,this can happen.The launch of Wigan’s People’s Alliance in the next few days bodes well as it appears to show that something is possible when build democratically from below,from the grassroots,from the local community level, where people can see what is needed and relevant to people’s needs.
We have to start from where we find ourselves, not from where necessarily we would want to be or waiting in vain for some great new idea which comes from on high to unite around is possibly a diversion.
Keep it simple.
Start from the community base,build the basis for unity in the community,give it a whole load of love and care,nurture trust and generate confidence………….
Comment by Peanuts — 18 August, 2009 @ 9:10 am
Excellent article in my opinion - and thanks for posting it up here, nice to have some real politics to discuss again!
I’d have to say I largely agree with Andy Beckett’s analysis here, in that the collapse of the private banking system and the utter duscrediting of “free-market” economics should, logically, have created an opportunity for the left.
But, as he points out, “the left” does not currently offer a serious and coherent way forward and yes, it’s been an opportunity missed.
Some on the left were arguing last autumn that the government was right to bail out the banking system, and that from that bailout the government could be pushed towards a more “social-democratic” stance in general, while others - the “revolutionary left” - were dusting down the slogan “nationalisation, without compensation under workers’ control.”
Neither of these positions really struck a chord with people, while the simplistic far-right, “blame it on the foreigners” mentality does seem to have won support.
In terms of the left getting its act together, Jon Crudass’s point is well made - well, his quote from Gramsci is quite apt anyway! - we on the left are still somewhat disorientated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and all that went with that. This has affected our self-confidence and yes, the simple truth is that we are “behind the game” if that makes sense.
However, there are some positive signs. The recent period has seen a dawning realisation that we do need unity and that we must cast some of our negative baggage aside.
At the moment, there appears to be a degree of coalescing around the principles of the People’s Charter and this, together with the welcome discussions between the various left groups - SWP and SP, Communist Party, Respect and some of the left Greens - around how to move forward do give some guarded grounds for optimism.
Yes, it’s all moving too slowly, but something that’s worthwhile is usually hard work to achieve and, at the very least, I do think we may well be able to present some form of unified, UK-wide left challenge at the next election.
Surely this must be our minimum target at this stage.
Comment by Communist — 18 August, 2009 @ 9:49 am
# 17 Laban Tall -
Yes! Race and gender and sexuality issues excited us far more than did the dumb boring uneducated and unaware working-class [whose actual real members usually had views on mass Third World immigration and - er - homosexuality that were the absolute opposite of OURS, the enlightened ones with posters of Guevara the Mass Murderer on our bedsit walls]
Even now the ‘Cool Left’ adores asylum seekers from primitive societies and instinctively distrusts White Van Men and those awfully boring Normal White Men With Jobs
Comment by bobby — 18 August, 2009 @ 10:05 am
It is amusing to recall that I am now old enough to remember when perfectly sane people supported the Labour Party as a matter of idealism.
Comment by bobby — 18 August, 2009 @ 10:07 am
@15 It is historically unprecedented levels of investment (about 43% of GDP) that are driving the Chinese economic model. It can’t be reduced to ‘cheap labour’.
Comment by little black sister — 18 August, 2009 @ 10:19 am
little black sister - are you suggesting that China and Vietnam are in some way progressive?
Comment by Steve — 18 August, 2009 @ 10:31 am
What’s really sad is the way he felt obliged to visited “Marxism” to check out the left. The fag-end of trendy ’60s radicalism, cults like the SWP do not speak for the “working class” or anyone else for that matter. These people were too busy creaming themselves over the “crisis of capitalism” to care or even think about the effects of the recession on ordinary lives.
The “anti-imperialist” love affair with Jihadism has rendered the hard left entirely unpalatable and the Green influence has imposed a quasi-religious brand of granola-crunching moralism and asceticism that is deeply unappealing. Once again, there is a secret celebration of the recession as a comeuppance and a curb on our profligate ways; an opportunity to “get back to the land” with pedal-powered washing machines and community barter schemes (”paint my house in exchange for some free reflexology” - yay!).
Much of the “movement” that trots out for “anti-Globalisation” protests isn’t really left at all. It shares a huge slab of irrational opinion with extremists of the right. We’re talking anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, hostility to science, food and health fads, economic localism and other distortions sprouting from the “blood and soil” roots of green ideology.
Somehow all this trash needs to be swept up and disposed of along with the mummified cadavers of dead Russians before we can have a “Left” that is even worthy of the name. The fact that the collapse of the Soviet Union should still cast such a shadow just shows our intellectual bankruptcy. By way of contrast, the free-market fundamentalists were able to keep their (at the time) deeply unfashionable ideas alive in minority think tanks throughout the post-war settlement until the time was ripe in the ’70s to unleash them. But what have we got? A corpse.
Comment by Charles Dexter Ward — 18 August, 2009 @ 10:47 am
Piss poor discussion developing here…. homophobic and racists glue sniffers like ‘bobby’ claiming that the left was too obsessed with blacks and gays. No mate, we also fought against the poll tax, fought the battles over pay and pensions, defended council housing, stood on the picket lines and organised in the canteens…
There is no understanding in this ‘discussion’ of the structural reasons why nationally based social democracy collapsed in the face of capitalist globalisation and neo-liberalism. No understanding of the real potential for socialist ideas to regrow on a new basis.
I’ve stated a discussion on me own blog…
Comment by Barry Kade — 18 August, 2009 @ 11:21 am
Fascism should have been buried in the ruins of the Reichskanzlei in 1945, but obviously it wasn’t. Because as offspring of capitalism in crisis, it will be resurrected as long as there is capitalism.
As to the free-market fundamentalists, they held sway during the first years of the Depression in the USA. Then the New Deal was brought in because the economy kept spinning downwards and the ruling class became worried about social destabilisation. But the free-market fundamentalists never went away. To some extent, the McCarthyism period was their revenge, as the New Deal was depicted as Communist-inspired.
Keynsianism and welfare were seen as giving away too much to ordinary people. Paul Volcker, then head of the Federal Reserve and favoured by both Carter and Reagan, said in 1980 that the living standards of the average American were too high and would have to fall. And they did, and have continued to fall. But someone has to be blamed, which is where immigrants and other out groups come in.
Comment by Nechayev — 18 August, 2009 @ 11:23 am
#30 - No, Barry Kade, never ever once in my life have I intentionally sniffed glue.
See?
Misrepresenting a [presumed] opponent is a cheap trick.
How many Afghans and Somalis and Eritreans and Kurds do you want to move into your neighbourhood?
See how cheap a trick it is?
Comment by bobby — 18 August, 2009 @ 11:36 am
I’m inclined to broadly agree with Dexter Ward in what he has argued here: Werther we like it or not the Tories are set to come back Cameron casting the shadow of Thatcher and slipping into those shoes: They will be ruthless; cuts, cuts and cuts. With Labour in opposition rising unemployment and the ongoing economic criss I expect to see the left rise in the Labour Party from the grass roots, but only after the General election. Until that time none of us are going anywhere and I’m not a member of the Labour Party.
Comment by Jim — 18 August, 2009 @ 11:38 am
# 33
Jim - Can you imagine ANYONE joining Labour out of real true honest conviction these days?
Labour is full of the careerist Mandelson-Milliband-Harperson gang and has been since Kinnock purged all those horrid lefties.
Comment by bobby — 18 August, 2009 @ 12:14 pm
#23 Peanuts. To clarify - by “radical” left I meant those left-wing forces that seek to replace the capitalism economic system by a “socialist” one - however they understand that - as distinct from those who seek to reform the way it operates. These are two rather different projects, each with their own problems. The radicals, as I said, do not have a credible alternative model they can put forward that would demonstrably work better than some form of capitalism. Proving capitalism is bad is fairly simple. Proving socialism would be better is much harder.
The reformists, on the other hand, are stymied by the fact that in this country, their party has presided over this mess in the first place, and will be booted out of power long before they get any chance to win Labour for their ideas and try their approach.
Having said all that, I can see some mileage in what Peanuts suggests, where there is the potential to build movements that can do something useful here and now. Small-scale initiatives that get concrete results are far more useful than grandiose schemes that get nowhere.
Comment by Francis King — 18 August, 2009 @ 12:18 pm
`Proving socialism would be better is much harder.’
That the public appropriation of the social product as opposed to its private appropriation by a tiny handful would be better is surely self explanatory to anybody who has nothing but their labour power to exchange and it should become increasingly self-explanatory as the bankruptcy of British capitalism becomes ever more apparent. When the state cannot afford the oil or gas or food that the rest of the world produces because its one and only `industry’, banking, has collapsed in ignomy taking everything else with it. When mass unemployment, wage cuts and currency devaluation ruin the mass of the population.
Socialism offers the immediate prospect of consolidation and redistribution (banks, multi-nationals, giant retailers, monopoly service industries in public hands)followed by the possibility of putting in place a rational, human-centric sustainable basis for future co-operative development for all the nations.
Comment by Thoughts — 18 August, 2009 @ 12:37 pm
#33 Funny how the purer the propagandist the more likely he is to wind up prostrate before events and the enemy he propagandises against.
Comment by Enlarged Prostate — 18 August, 2009 @ 12:42 pm
How precisely does something become increasingly self-explanatory? It either is or it isn’t. If by “self-explanatory” you mean “obvious”, well obviously the case for socialism isn’t obvious to most people in Britain. And I doubt if your apocalyptic scenario of mass immiseration would make it any more so, frankly.
Comment by our lad george — 18 August, 2009 @ 12:44 pm
#29 Charles Dexter Ward- yes we do need to move on from the collapse of the Soviet Union, but whether you like it or not, what the USSR represented was a huge country ( a superpower ) which was dominated by an economic system borne out of an attempt to overthrow capitalist property relations and establish socialism. Whatever analysis anyone has of what actally happened in the USSR, and the nature of the regime that existed at various times, that it what it represented.
Moreover, I think few people have a love affair with “jihadism” on the left-. There are people who err in the direction of being soft on islamists because muslims are seen to be under attack, but there are also those on the left who err towards islamaphobia and capitulaton to imperialist militarism.
The former is unhelpful, but the latter is worse.
#33 Jim- what do you suggest as the way forward?
To everyone- if I recall correctly from my reading of comments made on previous posts, Bobby is BNP. He/ she is definitely a racist. Treat my suspicion as you see fit.
Comment by Armchair — 18 August, 2009 @ 12:48 pm
#38 Yes, you are quite right `our lad george’ to get totally worked up about that formulation. Perhaps I should have said `will come to be seen as an increasingly urgent necessity’ or some such. Hopefully everybody else got the drift.
Of course, the `apocalyptic’ immiseration will not automatically lead to socialism if a leadership isn’t formed in the working class that can make it happen. But the venom with which you make your point seems to suggest that it is I who is about to impose severely harsh austerity measures on the working class and not the capitalist/imperialist class. You could have just said you think things are going to be fine.
Comment by Thoughts — 18 August, 2009 @ 12:52 pm
#36. It’s not so hard to prove the case for socialism to other socialists. In fact, it’s what we all do best - lots of us love arguing about the finer points of the theory, and have whiled away many happy hours doing so. But we must not forget that we are discussing an imaginary economic system. And of course, our imaginary system would be better than their real system - if it were practicable and feasible. That is what we have to demonstrate - if we can.
Comment by Francis King — 18 August, 2009 @ 1:08 pm
In reply to #27, where do China’s defenders think that ‘historically unprecedented’ levels of investment come from, if not through restricting consumption? And of course the levels of investment are not completely without precedent - Maoism achieved the same very high levels of investment, and the restrictions of workers’ consumption were much more obvious back then.
Comment by chjh — 18 August, 2009 @ 1:10 pm
It’s such a shame the SWP refused to allow a Socialist Party speaker to address their conference, when they have been allowed to debate at the equivalent SP event.
Shame on the SWP!
Comment by Anonymous — 18 August, 2009 @ 1:15 pm
#27 Accumulate!Accumulate! That’s Moses and the Prophets!
Comment by tyresome points — 18 August, 2009 @ 1:20 pm
Well I apologise if I came across as either totally worked up or venomous. I am actually quite calm and philosophical. I do tend to agree with you to some extent, inasmuch as I think that ultimately Leninist perspectives do have to rest on some version of the theory of total immiseration of the working class to make any sense, which is why they don’t make any sense.
Comment by our lad george — 18 August, 2009 @ 1:25 pm
sorry, that was in response to #40.
Comment by our lad george — 18 August, 2009 @ 1:28 pm
# 33
Yes you have a point and a good one at that; but things could change in different cercumstances, we don’t know do we?
But what we do know is that the left haven’t been able to put together a workable alternative in 12 years from the SLP to Respect, and the clock is ticking, the General election is months away and its outcome is almost certain, who can say what is going to happen after that, but one thing is for sure: it isn’t going to be nice, and that may mean hopefully that a new generation may come into play joining those of us who still resist and refuse to lie down meekly!
Comment by Jim — 18 August, 2009 @ 1:31 pm
From Anonymous at (43) “It’s such a shame the SWP refused to allow a Socialist Party speaker to address their conference, when they have been allowed to debate at the equivalent SP event.”
Are you sure Anon? I didn’t go to the SWP event myself, but my SWP friend that I work with told me that the SP’s Hannah Sell did speak at the conference.
Comment by Communist — 18 August, 2009 @ 1:39 pm
@28: Yes, I think that workers’ states are progressive.
Comment by little black sister — 18 August, 2009 @ 1:40 pm
#49 - China? A workers’ state? Progressive? That’s one of the funniest thing I’ve ever read on this site, and I’ve read Andy’s thoughts on Gary McKinnon!
Comment by Jonny Mac — 18 August, 2009 @ 2:13 pm
Going back to the original article - there’s some interesting stuff there, but the headline and sub-title are completely off the mark. Neal Lawson talks about the best opportunity since the 1930s - he should remember that there wasn’t a massive, universal shift to the Left as a result of the Wall St Crash, it was a very uneven process depending on political alignments in different countries. Hitler came to power in Germany, Roosevelt in the USA. The Popular Front victories in France and Spain were the most radical things that happened in the 30s, and neither was a direct response to the economic crisis. It wasn’t until the 1940s and the end of WWII that the shift to the Left really happened. You can’t expect an economic crisis to suddenly reverse two decades of retreat; any shift to the Left over the next few years is likely to mature slowly.
Andy Beckett should also really know better than to write “the Brown government’s mild tilt to the left has made it no more popular”. That “tilt” is more a case of media hype than anything else. Brown went out of his way to advertise to everyone that his government was going to follow in Blair’s footsteps, inviting Maggie to Downing St and bringing Mandy back from Brussels just as the crisis hit. A small increase in the top rate of tax isn’t going to repair the damage to the Labour Party of ten years of Blairism, people who have been staying at home on election day for years aren’t going to be lured back by something that small, especially when they see attempts to privatise the post office etc. going ahead at the same time. There’s many things for left-wingers to feel concerned about at the moment, but not the weak standing of the Labour Party - that is one thing that we can emphatically deny any responsibility for, the Blairites and Brownites have controlled the party for more than a decade in office and if Labour is in trouble now, they can take the blame for it.
Comment by Ed W — 18 August, 2009 @ 2:17 pm
Dream Deferred
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.poemhunter.com%2Fi%2Febooks%2Fpdf%2Flangston_hughes_2004_9.pdf&ei=XaeKSpToBYWsjAebuZBg&rct=j&q=langston+hughes+poems&usg=AFQjCNEoc68f_42uIjHJWkPUcBjH-bl_Tw
Comment by timothyMN — 18 August, 2009 @ 2:23 pm
If ‘Marxism’ is anything to go by, we’re screwed. The SWP are happier the further they are away from actually getting anything done. They are, in majority, a useless bunch for whom carping from the sidelines is far preferable to the compromises that will lead to anything actually getting done.
I was disgusted by the Marxism even when I attended, too many people from too many parties just there to proclaim themselves more left than the other, stuck with their heads in the clouds, expelling hot air and not trying to move anything forwards. They are happy in their complacency that waiving placards will bring the evil capitalist class to it’s knees, but even if they did achieve that they would have no idea what to do next
Comment by Bearded Socialist — 18 August, 2009 @ 2:38 pm
I must say that it seems to be a favourite prlour game of unorganised left leaning politicos - o nthe blogosphere and in the media - to wax lyrical about what ‘the left’ (you know that composite object) has got wrong. Usually the substantial efforts of the dispartely organised people who actually make up the left are implitally compared with what an idealised left would look like. In this article it seems that the left just needs to decide to scratch its collective head nad ddecide to offer a coherent alternative - the abscence of which I do not imagine has acutally been established by any substantial reading of the left wing press on the part of the author.
Comment by Reuben — 18 August, 2009 @ 2:40 pm
Jonny Mac should tell us which capitalist states have pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the last twenty years. That is what can be done once you have a socialist revolution, as happened in China in 1949. Of course China may not be your idea of a “workers paradise”. Neither was the USSR, but it was better than capitalism - a position that Leon Trotsky died defending. No capitalist country is acting like China. The massive investment levels come from the benefits of not having to finance a dominant capitalist class. Direct government investment is being used to promote a massive expansion of the economy. They do not have to rely upon indirect Keynesian methods. And the government is under the control of a party which won a revolutionary war against imperialism. In an impoverised, colonialised country it is hardly suprising that the struggle has been much harsher than in a rich, imperialist country. But is this progressive - absolutely. Right on, Little Black Sister.
Comment by StevieB — 18 August, 2009 @ 2:53 pm
#47- Jim, in my view both the SLP and Respect in their own ways represented steps towards what is needed. The SLP definitively failed but the jury is out on Respect.
What in your view is needed?
Comment by Armchair — 18 August, 2009 @ 3:05 pm
Which big chance was this? A good article which sums up the failure, good as far as I am concerned, to create a gulag in which people like me would be murdered.
Comment by billaricaydickey — 18 August, 2009 @ 3:17 pm
I’m not going to spend time arguing with anyone who thinks the USSR ‘was better than capitalism’. Oh, I can’t resist. By what metric was it ‘better’ over its seventy-odd year history than say the USA, StevieB? How many millions killed in political purges, most popular with Trotsky, or what?
Comment by Jonny Mac — 18 August, 2009 @ 3:52 pm
#51 I like your cool context; it reminds why I heat what happened to the Labour Party, what it has done and what it hadn’t. One big factor has been to keep the restraints on Trade Unions from organising as they ought to have been able too, helped I feel by the introduction of the minimum wage £5.73 worth of chicken feed. As an unemployed person, I’m worried about being frogged marched into working for my benefits any time soon and thanks to New Labour!
We can go over what went wrong, what led us to where we are today and so on. We can talk about elections to parliament or the local council that hasn’t the same legislative power as it had twenty or so years past.
We need stop focusing on negatives as we do (me included), and start laying some sort of concrete platform that we can build from (easily said I know)that can reach out to others for when our time comes, as it will. When I come on to the socialist unity site I that by and large I’m speaking with socialists - but always in the back of my mind is that nagging feeling that we ought to be speaking to more non-socialists with a view to bringing others along not just for an election but to re-build the socialist case in the 21 century.
Comment by Jim — 18 August, 2009 @ 3:55 pm
To answer Jonny Mac, the USSR was better than capitalism because it raised the living standards of the workers and peasants far higher than the previous capitalist regime had. The revolution allowed the USSR to become a substantial economic power. The life expectancy of Russia’s population today has collapsed following the re-introduction of capitalism. On an international level, the USSR supported and often armed anti-colonial movements and governments against the colonialists. However much socialists may qualify their view, the USSR contributed to human progress.
The imperialist powers, including the US and UK capitalists, may not have had internal purges. Instead, they were, and are, involved in colonial and imperialist wars whose victime can be counted in tens of millions in the 20th century. Shall we also speak of slavery, and the colonialism of the 19th century whose victims cannot be numbered?
As I asked you, which capitalist country has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the last 20 years?
Comment by StevieB — 18 August, 2009 @ 4:35 pm
little black sister - I’m not sure that too many people in China would agree with your assessment of it as progressive, especially those suffering oppression and those trying to organise politically. Maybe you think North Korea is progressive too if judging by the same standards? Bizarre!!
Any idea what is happening with the various left unity projects? The SWP appeal for unity seems to have dissipated, the AWL call for a Socialist Alliance? No2EU and the SP/CPB? It’s just that a General Election is pretty iminent and we will need to be running with this pretty quickly if we are serious about left unity. It would be a shame if we couldn’t even unite ourselves!
Comment by Steve — 18 August, 2009 @ 4:44 pm
Seriously, what is the point in running candidates in the general election on a Socialist Alliance/Left Unity/Real Labour/RESPECT ticket?
After twelves years of New Labour shit, the only achievement of the various cobbled-together Trotskyist and Communist electoral fronts has been electing one MP, who is widely regarded as a bit of a joke and will lose his seat next year. That’s it. In a Parliament of 600+ MPs.
I can understand the point of standing in council elections or whatever, but general elections where you need thousands upon thousands of votes? Don’t waste your time trying to get from 0.5% up to 0.8% of the vote.
Comment by realist — 18 August, 2009 @ 4:57 pm
#56 sorry didn’t spot your post.
I became a member of the SLP when it first started worked in the GE of 97 and sat on it’s Yorkshire EC for a time.
I become disillusioned like a lot of people and left. At that time I thought like you, that it was needed and the same can be said of Respect. My own personal opinion is that Respect is heading in the same direction but as you say the jury is out, so we can only wait and see really but I will not be holding my breath!
As for what is needed: simple unity of propose, would be a start; how exactly that comes about is quite another mater, I’m just one fish out of the water!
Comment by Jim — 18 August, 2009 @ 5:04 pm
The question is not just whether the left can cobble together some party to ‘take advantage’ of the recession (thus far its efforts have been rather abysmal and the article’s suggestion that Brown is stealing the left’s clothes is rather telling - although I might contend that the left’s slogans basically show it is swallowing Keynesianism) - and make proposals for government… but rather, that workplace resistance can stop the jobs onslaught.
I thought this article by Gregor Gall was an honest assessment of where we’re at - http://thecommune.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/resisting-redundancy-and-recession-appraising-the-tactic-of-occupation/
Comment by kronstadter — 18 August, 2009 @ 5:06 pm
Don’t think my post worked… but I said that I thought that the left ought not just try and cobble together some electoral party and make abstract proposals for government (it is rather telling that the Grauniad piece claims that Brown’s Keynesianism somehow steals the left’s clothes) when in fact building workplace resistance to the recession is far more important. Gregor Gall gives a good assessment of where we’re at - http://thecommune.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/resisting-redundancy-and-recession-appraising-the-tactic-of-occupation/
Comment by kronstadter — 18 August, 2009 @ 5:11 pm
grr. sorry Andy, you can delete no. 65…
Comment by kronstadter — 18 August, 2009 @ 5:12 pm
StevieB -
“the USSR was better than capitalism because it raised the living standards of the workers and peasants far higher than the previous capitalist regime had”
Oh ffs. If your metric to test if the USSR was ‘better’ than ‘capitalism’ is living standards, the test is clearly not whether living standards in the USSR were higher than in pre-revolutionary Russia; the test is whether living standards in the USSR over its 70 year period rose higher than in the US, or the UK, in the same period. Clearly they did not. (And anyway, The Russia of the Tsar was not capitalist, it was feudal.)
“The revolution allowed the USSR to become a substantial economic power”
Yes…and capitalism allowed the US, over the same period, to become a far more substantial economic power.
Re China: yes, over the last twenty years or so, living standards in China have risen for millions as the regime has embraced state-capitalism and turned its back on Mao. It has done so at the cost of appalling environmental degradation and the continuing vile oppression of basic human rights and freedoms and the denial of political freedom. How any socialist can call such a regime ‘progressive’ is beyond me.
Comment by Jonny Mac — 18 August, 2009 @ 5:21 pm
#45 `Well I apologise if I came across as either totally worked up or venomous. I am actually quite calm and philosophical. I do tend to agree with you to some extent, inasmuch as I think that ultimately Leninist perspectives do have to rest on some version of the theory of total immiseration of the working class to make any sense, which is why they don’t make any sense.’
Thanks for that, but I don’t think the Leninist perspective relies on the total immiseration of the working class, it’s often too late by then, but on the resistance to that immiseration. Only Lenin opposed the coming imperialist slaughter of WW1 and correctly so. Result: successful revolution. Only those who implacably oppose brain, tooth and nail the coming austerity programme planned for the workers and middle classes of Britain and the authoritarian crackdown that will accompany it will be successsful.
Comment by Thoughts — 18 August, 2009 @ 5:35 pm
60
“On an international level, the USSR supported and often armed anti-colonial movements and governments against the colonialists. However much socialists may qualify their view, the USSR contributed to human progress.
I think the residents of east Germany, Poland, Hungary, The Czech Republic, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia may disagree with you; when given the choice, they voted with their …. votes. The second they were given the choice they ran away from the bear as fast as they could.
As for the Russians themselves, if communism was that good, why did they get rid of it?
Comment by Arnold — 18 August, 2009 @ 5:45 pm
Well Jonny Mac as you do not regard raising living standards as significant then what is the point of socialism? After all if capitalism can still advance the living standards of hundreds of millions of people then it remains progressive. But it can only do that for a small minority of humanity and that is why it needs to be replaced.
The state in Russia was feudal, hence the February revolution, but society was capitalist, hence the October revolution.
Why should the comparison be with the strongest capitalist power - ie the US. A more accurate measure would be the weaker capitalist powers - such as Portugal. The relative position of these two powers in the 20th century is clear.
Clearly you do not regard the contribution the USSR made to the anti-colonial revolution as important. That speaks volumes.
China’s economic reform - which is clearly under the direction of the state - has lifted of hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, not “millions” as you suggest. This is where “human rights” actually begin, not in some elitist notion that certain western capitalist political forms are the measure of all progress. And on the environment, the Chinese government are becoming more innovative on this all the time.
Sorry,but you still haven’t said which capitalist power has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the last 20 years.
Comment by StevieB — 18 August, 2009 @ 5:55 pm
@48
I believe Hannah was given 5 minutes, I could be wrong. The SWP speaker at Socialism 2008 was Martin Smith and if I remember correctly you can find the video of the debate session on the Socialist Party website
Comment by Leftwing Criminologist — 18 August, 2009 @ 6:03 pm
China is a capitalist power.
Comment by bill j — 18 August, 2009 @ 6:13 pm
Steve B
The answer to your question “which capitalist power has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the last 20 years?” is China.
I’ve just spent the afternoon listening to four of my Chinese students giving a presentation on the economic changes in China. Each has their own business in China, currently being managed by a relative while they study for MScs in the UK. Three employ around 20 staff, one 140. All that remains of communism in China is the name of the party and a tendency to end presentations with the phrase, “for the glory Chinese people.” However it is usually preceded by, “for the wealth of my family.”
The one that employs 140 people intends to send his son to Glenalmond College.
Comment by Arnold — 18 August, 2009 @ 6:32 pm
#63 Jim I think we were probably in the SLP at the same time. I also became disillusioned and left together wuith a lot of other people who felt the same way as me.
My view still is that it had tremendous potential, and that for a brief period of time, particularly in certain parts of the country, it provided a model for the type of formation needed by the left, and, far more importantly, by the working class in England and Wales (Scotland is a more complicated issue).
A lot of energy, commitment and positive engagement with masses of real people, together with the appeal of Scargill and the miner’s strike was wasted, but I still feel that there were positives from the experience.
Also, the fact that the SLP can still get the sort of vote it did in the Euro elections in spite of doing zero campaigning apart from a sad broadcast, and having virtually no public profile, is an indication to me, in part, that something remains from the work that was done back then.
Unfortunately I doubt very much, to say the least, that the SLP now has any positive role to play, although you never know.
Comment by Armchair — 18 August, 2009 @ 6:33 pm
Could Arnold elaborate as to why the existence of small businesses in China means that it is not a workers state?
Its Marxism fucking 101 in here, and some people are going to get a Fail.
Comment by Mikey — 18 August, 2009 @ 6:49 pm
“A more accurate measure would be the weaker capitalist powers - such as Portugal”
Lenin identified Russia as a major imperialist power in “Imperialism”, where he points out in relation to Portugal that “it is an independent sovereign state, but actually, for more than two hundred years, since the war of the Spanish Succession (1701-14), it has been a British protectorate”. So not a very good comparison at all.
“The relative position of these two powers in the 20th century is clear.” Indeed. If we do make the comparison, Portugal comes out well ahead of Russia or any of the former Soviet Union components in terms of GDP or PPP per capita.
Comment by our lad george — 18 August, 2009 @ 7:01 pm
And, let me add, for about 50 years of the post-1917 period Portugal had a government that was not particularly interested in promoting economic growth.
Comment by our lad george — 18 August, 2009 @ 7:02 pm
What exactly is a “workers’ state” anyway? In any modern hierarchical society people can be divided broadly into 2 categories: those who give the orders, or “bosses” and those who carry them out, or “workers”. The concept of the “workers’ state” is therefore the most basic contradiction in terms - the notion that the people who are giving the orders are at the same time the people who are carrying them out. It makes no sense.
As for the states that people designate “workers’ states”, I fail to see any real mechanisms through which the working classes can actually exercise their rule in those countries. In each case they are run by strictly hierachical parties that rule in the workers’ name, but in no case allowing the workers any opportunity to express their opinions of those parties. But there again, given the meaninglessness of the concept, that is hardly surprising.
Comment by Francis King — 18 August, 2009 @ 7:55 pm
#72 Hi Armchair,
Strange but I find agreement with you: I still cry over the SLP; what an opportunity lost, I was one of the first to contact Scargill when he said he was setting up the SLP and within weeks we had him in Scunthorpe specking at a packed to the rims meeting which led to a Branch being set-up and not a small one but with a large membership, many members joined because they conceived the Labour Party as being crap even before they came into power, and they didn’t all come out of the Labour Party like me. My best mate at the time was the PPC in Scunthorpe Brian Hopper I spent 4 weeks working in both Newham and Scunthorpe went to the count in support of Brian who stood against the now disgraced MP Elliot Morley who kept giving me dirty looks throughout as I had spent my time in a minority during the last two or three years defending clause 4 and just speaking out against New Labour.
I was very disappointed with Scargill even though I had given him all my support during the NUM strike and he stood tall in my eyes, but not just that but because ordinary people were joining the SLP who never had been a part of a political party in there life – all lost what a frigging shame.
Well I did stop crying some time ago, because it’s not over until the last fight comrade. I became a member of the Labour Party when I was 17 I’m currently on the dole and doubt if ever I will work again but at 53 I’m still up for the fight that’s on its way and I know too so are many others, we have a job of work to do and we must do it together united not divided!
Comment by Jim — 18 August, 2009 @ 8:03 pm
From Iceland:
`My government, which took over in February and gained a majority in general elections in May, has to deal with the aftermath of the fall of nearly all of Iceland’s privatised banking sector.
`We plan a 30 per cent contraction in government finances over the next three years, with extensive cuts to infrastructure spending and wages - a heavy burden for our population of 300,000. We have, in co-operation with the International Monetary Fund, formulated an economic strategy that is being fully adhered to. Indeed, we have already reached agreements on a recapitalisation of the banking sector, a stability pact with social partners and a strategy for lifting current account restrictions.’
Comment by News From Afar — 18 August, 2009 @ 10:04 pm
some of the people posting on this thread need to get a grip!!!
the idea that the USSR and China are anything to celebrate is utterly absurd.
do we really have to mention the gulags, purges or expansionist wars these states have undertaken? do i need to mention that websites like this would be banned in China and USSR? (if that relic were still with us) do i need to mention that the chance of any left of center parties being allowed to exist let alone convene in these states would be non existent?
it takes someone with literally no respect for their own hard fought for civil liberties to say something so wrong.
Comment by andy — 18 August, 2009 @ 10:42 pm
I find it a bit depressing that a piece from the guardian is the only contribution that Andy can find to discuss the state of the left. It shows a lack of self-analysis by the left as well as obvious evidence for the lowering of horizons that has happened since the end of the Miner’s strike.
For another perspective on the left go to http://meanwhileatthebar.org/blog/
Comment by Des Carter — 18 August, 2009 @ 11:04 pm
Jim- nice one. Sorry I called you smug and irritating!
If you fancy giving your thoughts on the Brum events, would still be interested.
Comment by Armchair — 18 August, 2009 @ 11:29 pm
StevieB - “the USSR was better than capitalism because it raised the living standards of the workers and peasants far higher than the previous capitalist regime had. The revolution allowed the USSR to become a substantial economic power.”
These two things were in fact inversely related. The USSR became a substantial power in the 1930s by depressing personal consumption (aka living standards’) to levels which kept the population in poverty, but which enabled the government to massively expand education, the military, aviation and heavy industry. Just in time for WW2, as it happened.
Similarly levels of personal consumption are low in China today, though nowhere near Soviet levels, which enables the government to expand etc etc.
In the West, by contrast, personal consumption is actually higher then GDP in many countries - the difference being made up by borrowing. Not a sustainable scenario.
(When the Soviets expanded education, it was real education, with right and wrong answers. They wanted - and needed - engineers, chemists, agronomists, vets, metallurgists. In the UK now we expand (using borrowed money) psychology, media studies, sociology, while physics departments close).
Comment by Laban Tall — 18 August, 2009 @ 11:42 pm
To Jim and Armchair in particular
What lessons can be learnt from your SLP experience and is there any remote possiblity of Arthur Scargill being willing and prepared to work with others and be part of socialist Left unity ? What was and is the problem withthe SLP as you see it ?
While very sceptical and no great lover of the SWP but just as we dont choose our families we dont have the luxury of not working together.It is neverthelss quite sobering to read what Alex Callinicos has to say in the recent Socialist review, that 1. we need to build the broadest mass movement and unity in action to drive back and isolate the BNP.
2.”We need to get our act together electorally. This requires, on the part of the different fragments of the radical left, “an acknowledgement of our collective failure”(my italics). This isn’t important for reasons of moral upliftment, but because all the different currents need to recognise that they lack an electoral project of their own that can offer the needed alternative to New Labour (I would say all the neo liberal capitalist parties). Only then can we begin to explore the possibilities of unity seriously. As long as we each harbour the illusion that we can make the breakthrough on our own, we are sunk.”
……………………………………………………
THE LAUNCH OF THE WIGAN PEOPLE’S ALLIANCE this coming saturday (when coincidentally Wigan are at home to Manchester United) provides a suitable opportunity for the birth of someting positive to support.See blog above or GOOGLE for further details……
The launch of the new Wigan, Leigh & Makerfield ‘People’s Alliance’
The Central Labour Club
Pemberton on Saturday 22nd August.
The meeting is scheduled to start at 1.00pm and finish at 4.00pm.
Comment by Peanuts — 18 August, 2009 @ 11:46 pm
I know it’s very very easy to snipe and criticise but hopefully there will also be some greater diversity of opinion at the Wigan launch and not just the all white male line up as the photo above implies.
The People’s charter for change website could do with a serious redesign, some bringing to life,more colourful and imaginative refeshment as presently it is rather dull and uninspiring and publicity seems to be almost non existent as far as I can see or am I missing something ……………..?
Nevertheless best wishes and solidarity to the launch at Wigan.
Comment by Fleabite — 19 August, 2009 @ 12:01 am
Debate on Degenerated Workers’ State versus State Capitalism
There have been good points made why the Soviet Union; China; and Vietnam were/are workers’ states. Trotsky when he wrote History of the Russian Revolution attacked those who believed Russian Capitalism could develop abstractly rather than concretely analyse how Imperialism was semi-Colonising Russia. He developed his theory and strategy of Permament Revolution from that analysis. In 1905 and History of the Russian Revolution Trotsky demonstrated how Imperialism stabalised their rule by working with semi-Feudal elemeents. Liberal Bourgeois elements betrayed the struggle for a republic against a Monarchy in 1905 because they feared the working class threatening their rule over different industries. The strategy of Permanent Revolution worked out by Trotsky was the working class would lead the middle class (Urban and rurel Peaasant)to lead a revolution which combined Bourgeois-Democratic tasks land to the Peasants by removing large-scale Landlords ownership; ending Imperialist ownership of major industries; combined with Socialist tasks of expropriating Capitalists.
Those who believe in State Capitalism are making the same methodological error that Trotsky refered in History of the Russian Revolution in not seeing that if Capitalism is fully restored productive forces built by a workers’ state would be set back by for decades. This would lead to tens of millions being made unemployed and their social gains being severely reduced or if not eliminated.
There is a completely un-dialectical attitude by one contributer to this site who does not distinguish between different stages that the Soviet/Russian Bureaucratised workers’ state has and is gone/going through. The Soviet/Russian Bureaucracy arose; reached its height; and has been in decay for 30 years. A majority of those on this site who agree with me that the Soviet Union was a workers’ state do not agree with me that Russia still remains a workers’ state because Capitalist restoration was halted mainly by those Bureaucrats whose privliges were threatened with that process.
Capitalist restoration has been threatend before but do similar defeats pro-Capitalist forces were defeated. In 1922 there were dangers that the Law of Value could overthrow the workers’ state with proposals that state money to different factories and industries be allocated on performance and the Monopoly of Foreign Trade be eliminated. Stalinism had not consolidated their power and pro-Capitalist forces could have won out. Lenin’s great achivement was salvaging the Monopoly of Foriegn Trade. I am not suggesting Stalinism winning out was progressive, but with centrfugal forces a greater danger was present Capitalist restoration.
Tony Cliff was proven wrong on two occasions when he argued that the reason Capitalist private property was not restored within the Soviet Union because they could not destroy nationalised industries for a whole period. Mandel showd in “Marxist Economic Theory” that as German Imperialism conquered ex-Soviet areas Capitalist private property was restored. Since 1990 in Russia Capitalists have pushed to detroy nationalised property relations as qucikly as possible.
Bureaucratic layers threatend by this process since Putin came to power in 2000 have halted that process by re-nationalising companies and pouring more resources into different nationalised industries and various social/public servicee. Bourgeois analyssts arge Russia invests in social spending wherehas China is building its infrastructure. There has also been occupations of certain factories against closure demanding re-nationalisation. On Russia Today TV show there were figures two days ago showing that Russia’s economy has shrunk by 10%. If Russia is Capitalist it would be ruled by a law of Value leading to mass unemployment. This has not happend yet which is one indication that the Russian Bureaucracy rules Russia. The failure of Capitalist restoration in Russia and its salvaging as a workers’ state weakens Capitalism internationally and is an important factor in stopping American Imperialism attacking other workers’ states and semi-colonies. Finally the Russian Workers’ Staten can offer aid to forces fighing against Fascism in the Baltic countries and Eastern Europe.
Steve is breaking from a Trotskyist understanding of what we defend in the workers’ states. As American Trotskyist Jim Cannon argued we defend the nationalised property relations against Capitalist restoration but oppose Stalinis when it crushes the workers and oppressed nationalites. Trotskysis are for the revolutionary overthrow of Stalinism through a Political Revolution. Trotsky when he wrote “In Defence of Marxism” that Marxists defend workers’ states through our methods. The factory occupations in Russia and revolutionary upheavals in China preventing a steel plant being privatised. An upturn in world revolution is becoming more anti-Stalinist and anti-Capitalist. Despite the resurgance of Russia as a workers’ state the Bureaucracy is still in a medium-term process of decay. This is why Trotsky is on the rise.
Comment by Anthony Brain — 19 August, 2009 @ 1:46 am
“The strategy of Permanent Revolution worked out by Trotsky was the working class would lead the middle class (Urban and rurel Peaasant)to lead a revolution which combined Bourgeois-Democratic tasks land to the Peasants by removing large-scale Landlords ownership; ending Imperialist ownership of major industries; combined with Socialist tasks of expropriating Capitalists.”
You forget the key other element in Trotsky’s theory - that the revolution had to spread internationally to survive. Russia could lead politically because of the global integration of capital but it lacked the level of productive development to complete the transition to socialism.
“Bureaucratic layers threatend by this process since Putin came to power in 2000 have halted that process by re-nationalising companies and pouring more resources into different nationalised industries and various social/public servicee. Bourgeois analyssts arge Russia invests in social spending wherehas China is building its infrastructure”
Russia’s economy, like most of those on the planet, went through a period of neo-liberalism when the USSR collapsed. The Neo-liberalism experienced in Russia was deeper and more severe - shock therapy as they called it - because it was a weaker economy than most of those in the developed world, with deeper structural imbalances than, say, Canada or Britain. But the shift from state to market and back to state has nothing to do with shifting power from class to class to class. Especially since in Russia it hasn’t involved the working class exercising political and economic control but simply different sections of the ruling class. It is simply a debate within the Russian bourgeoisie about how to save the country by restoring profitability. We have seen the same process on a milder scale take place here - with elements of privatization of healthcare and social services, etc.
In any case - any western Marxist who thinks that promoting China as the model for workers, or Russia for that matter, has zero chance of rebuilding the Left.
Comment by redbedhead — 19 August, 2009 @ 2:37 am
#70 “China is a capitalist power.”
I agree. If you’ve spent any time there in the past five years - have you StevieB? - you’ll know that it’s a ruthlessly capitalist society, where may are getting very rich and many remain languishing in poverty, where enormous develeopment is going on (Beijing is now bigger than Belgium!) with no regard for the environmental impact, and that is deformed by massive corruption and the complete absence of political freedom and freedom of expression.
It’s about as progressive as Dick Cheney.
Comment by Jonny Mac — 19 August, 2009 @ 10:21 am
Sadly it says something already about the Wigan developments that they organise their first meeting on a Saturday afternoon when Wigan Athletic are playing Man Utd. Brilliant.
As for Callinicos calling for the broadest mass movement to defeat the BNP, if this means more of the same UAF approach, it’s clear the SWP have learnt absolutely nothing, surprise, surprise. After all, they don’t even seem to know what the difference is between a popular front and a united front. That isn’t just ideological nitpicking - it’s crucial. Marxism 2009? Shouldn’t that be petty bourgeois radical 2009?
Comment by Doug — 19 August, 2009 @ 10:34 am
It’s strange how a facile article in the Guardian has triggered off an onslaught of Trotskyist claptrap about China. How knowledgable these “experts” on socialist development are! They profess by their studies of obscurantist articles by Trotsky where revolutions went wrong and meander from theory to theory, all irrelevant and misleading.
China’s socialist development in the past 20 years has been remarkable. Even the UN has had to recognise that no other nation on this planet has lifted so many people out of poverty in so short a timespan than China. The Chinese Communist party are only to well aware of the dangers that encouraging a massive influx of investment carried. But their thesis has always been that socialism cannot be built on poverty, that socialism itself in China might take at least 200 years to complete. The Chinese communist party and its people live in the real world of building a better and more equitable nation. Not in the fantasy world of Trotskyism.
Comment by Alfie — 19 August, 2009 @ 10:51 am
#89 Alflie your really funny - do you know that?
Comment by Jim — 19 August, 2009 @ 11:37 am
#90 I think Alfie is generally accurate and you are generally vey wrong.
Comment by Anonymous — 19 August, 2009 @ 11:47 am
“socialism itself in China might take at least 200 years to complete”
wow - now that’s inspiring. “comrades, wait for 200 years! In the meantime, our system will be indistinguishable from the worst capitalist exploitation of the world’s developing nations. Oh, and those of us who are bringing you to socialism will live lives of luxury.” Four legs good, two legs better!
Comment by redbedhead — 19 August, 2009 @ 11:57 am
#91 Well good for Anonymous - That’s two of you then!
Comment by Jim — 19 August, 2009 @ 11:58 am
#87 “It’s about as progressive as Dick Cheney.”
Raising millions of people out of poverty is objectively progressive even regardless of the politics of the government that does it.
Alfie at 89, that’s well said on China. Though I should point out that Trotsky would have agreed that China is a workers’ state. It’s inaccurate to associate him with the ultra-left garbage that sometimes comes out in his name.
Comment by little black sister — 19 August, 2009 @ 11:59 am
There was an article on China’s looming economic crisis by Larry Elliot in the same issue of the Guardian which has a far greater undertanding of the dynamics of the Chinese economy than some robobrains here. Also mentioned Chris Harman’s excellent new bookwhich you really ough to read.
Comment by Jaason Simmons — 19 August, 2009 @ 12:03 pm
#94 Has it by any chance escaped your attention that well over one billion people live under the poverty line in China, and what about gender discrimination on the prospects of girls and women. Though gender discrimination is not equivalent to poverty, such discrimination is a vulnerability factor that can impoverish.
Malnutrition, coupled with low access to health care, may heighten her vulnerability during the first five years of her life. If she attended school, there is a chance that the lessons would not be in her ethnic language and she is likely to remain illiterate. If she wanted to work off the farm there are far fewer opportunities for her than her brother and if she did find work, she would be paid less for it. She would be unlikely to be able to enter politics or the government services, as these are predominantly open to men. If she migrated to the cities she would find no welcome from the authorities or residents there as urban poverty and unemployment begins to climb. Continued poverty and a sense of desperation could lead her towards high-risk behavior or ill health, treatment for which she would not be able to afford in the city and would be difficult to find in her home region. As she became older and no longer able to work she would find fewer working people able to look after her as the income/dependency ratio changes to her disadvantage.
This the workers state you wax on about then!
Comment by Jim — 19 August, 2009 @ 12:19 pm
sorry Jim are you writing about someone you know there or are you just making stuff up to justify an argument without factual basis?
Comment by Mikey — 19 August, 2009 @ 12:24 pm
Well despite everything, the best that the opponents of the Chinese “model” can come up with is that it is “capitalist”. Is this why the Chinese economy has registered a year on year growth in the second quarter of 7.9%? All the major imperialist powers registered a negative percentage in this period. For example, the UK registered a negative 3.2%. And this is supposed to be the same as China?
Please explain what the Chinese government is doing right which the other governments are doing wrong.
It may be difficult to accept that because the dominant forces of production are state owned then it is possible for the Chinese government to directly change investment policy, leading to the current record levels of investment in China. But through its direction of the state sector, the Chinese government is expanding the Chinese economy. Urban fixed investment increased by 35.3% to the year in June 2009. All figures courtesy of the “Socialist Economic Bulletin” website.
Not having to satisfy the cravings of a dominant capitalist class has advantages for society as a whole.
Of course this does not make China a paradise. Simply an improvement on capitalism which has lifted the living standards of hundreds of millions of people. Those socialists who cannot accept this need to consider the real needs of the majority of humanity who do not have the aristocratic lifestyles of a western capitalist minority.
As for the Chinese government having “no regard for the environmental impact”, today’s Guardian notes than China is now the fourth largest producer of wind energy and is set to become the world’s largest. Generally the Chinese government is displaying a growing awareness of environmental issues.
There is a legacy from the history of imperialist aggression and occupation of China - remember British colonialisation only ended in July 1997. The Chinese people have had to claw every inch of progress from poverty. For the most advanced economies of the imperialist centres, the break with capitalism will not be so terribly painful. But it has yet to be made, and a little modesty would be welcome from socialists who have yet to achieve it.
Comment by StevieB — 19 August, 2009 @ 12:27 pm
The trouble with the debate about China or indeed the ex-Soviet Union is that most taking part in it wouldn’t recognise an unresolved contradiction if it bit them on the nose. Adapting to mere empiricism, which must of necessity come with all the baggage of bourgeois prejudices and values, China for our protagonists it seems is either socialist or capitalist. Is it not possible to recognise the absence of a ruling Chinese capitalist class or a self-serving bureaucracy when we see one? Those who think China is a capitalist state or state capitalist should explain this miracle. Those who don’t think the chauvinist bureaucracy are anything but a danger to the feudal/imperialist capitalist overturn of 1949 should explain that miracle.
If the degenerate workers state of China collapses the state sector will be destroyed by international competition proving that China is not socialist. However, the regime that takes its place will most definitely also prove in the most negative way that it is not capitalist being made up as it will be by a combination of the degenerate chinese bourgeois satraps of imperialism represented in the kuomintang and the fascistic petty bourgoeis elements in the Christian Phalon Gong with Al Qaida making up the numbers in the outlying regions. Many communists will die and the workers will be fucked.
We have the likes of SWP, PR et al uncritically cheering for counter revolution as they did when the Sovit Union collapsed and a bunch of Stalinists covering for the bureaucracy as it endangers the revolution. A working class policy please.
Now, it would be good if in this thread we could get back to the tasks of the left in Britain in the wake of the economic bankruptcy of British capitalism.
Comment by Thoughts — 19 August, 2009 @ 12:28 pm
#94 “Raising millions of people out of poverty is objectively progressive even regardless of the politics of the government that does it.”
Would a fascist dictatorship that raised millions out of poverty, through similar corporatist state-directed investment that’s been happening in China, be objectively progressive?
What utter, utter crap. Nihilistic, dead-end, vicious politics.
Comment by Jonny Mac — 19 August, 2009 @ 12:57 pm
As someone who thinks that China is state capitalist, can I just say that jim’s assertions in #96 are wrong in almost every respect.
It’s not true that almost a billion people live under the poverty line; it’s not true that most girls leave school illiterate (though the illiteracy figure for women is still higher than that for men); and it’s not true that there are fewer opportunities for girls to work in the cities.
As someone who thinks, can I just say I’ve seen fewer less likely scenarios for China’s collapse than Thoughts’ in #99. There is zero prospect of the Guomindang allying with Falun Gong (who are emphatically not Christians, and have no political ambitions at all), and to introduce Al Quaida into the mix is simply buying into the Chinese regime’s echoing of Western Islamophobia.
Comment by chjh — 19 August, 2009 @ 1:15 pm
94 - Why do you think Trotsky would have thought of China as a workers state? He would have thought no such thing. What part of China is under any form of workers control? There isn’t anything in the sense of a workers state or socialism currently in China.
Comment by Steve — 19 August, 2009 @ 1:35 pm
#96 This is the ultra-left line of thinking that because China is not a paradise of perfect equality and plenty it is not socialist.
This is rather silly. A workers’ state may contain poverty and all sorts of other problems. It may even contain a large private capitalist sector. What matters is, which class is defended by the state apparatus? Bourgeoisie or proletariat?
If no state is a workers’ state unless it lives up to the British ultra-left’s standards, we can all give up the struggle now.
Comment by little black sister — 19 August, 2009 @ 1:38 pm
#100 Well, OK, except when it’s fascist. That’s a failure in my wording. I was waiting for someone to jump on that.
Comment by little black sister — 19 August, 2009 @ 1:39 pm
#102 Because Trotsky recognised that the bureaucracy was a degenerated layer of the *proletariat*, not a separate class with different interests. In the bureaucratic states, the proletariat is still in charge, only in a distorted form.
This is why he’d consider China a workers’ state.
Comment by little black sister — 19 August, 2009 @ 1:41 pm
“Would a fascist dictatorship that raised millions out of poverty, through similar corporatist state-directed investment that’s been happening in China, be objectively progressive?”
Except of course for the inconvenient fact that no such regime has ever existed (a bit like Tony Cliff’s State Capitalist Russia!).
Germany and Italy were already much more developed, advanced capitalist countries, light years ahead of where China was at even in the 1950’s when fascism took power and their growth rates are nowhere near as impressive as China’s from 1953 onwards. Check out this website to compare GDP growth rates between fascist or dictatorial regimes and those of China (or the USSR for that matter in the 1930’s and post war period up to 1970)
http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/gdp-growth-by-region-and-country-3
The only possible historical case for your absurd statement would be the dictatorships of Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore in the 60’s and 70’s. However the difference with those regimes is that although they adopted state capitalist policies, i.e. government cooperation with actual capitalists like the owners Hyundai in South Korea, this was massively underwritten by US imperialism as a bulwark against Soviet and especially Chinese influence. So the process of capital formation was completely different from China.
Do you want to know what a capitalist dictatorship left to its own devices in the neo-colonial world looks like? Haiti, Columbia, Nigeria, the DRC etc.
China is not a workers paradise by any stretch of the imagination (no one has claimed that it is) but the 1949 Revolution was a hugely progressive event in human history and despite the fact that Chine is evolving in the direction of a capitalist economy due to the blind alley of a bureaucratic dictatorship, the publically owned portion of the economy is still significant and should be defended. Instead of trashing the historical achievements of the Chinese people we should be giving solidarity to Chinese workers struggling for democratic rights while at the same time not defending what remains of the nationalized economy. Not an inch should be given to capitalist propaganda a that it would make no difference what “type” of capitalism is present in China.
Comment by Neil — 19 August, 2009 @ 1:42 pm
#102 I also think that Trotsky would have approved of the way that the Chinese economy was ingetrated into the world economy whilst retaining its core state owned industrial base. This is the fundamental difference between what happened in China and in the ex-USSR and it is for this reason that there has been such impressive socio-economic development in the country. This is also becomming increasingly evident as the crisis deepens within the world capitalist economy. This does not mean that we have to approve of all the policies of the Chinese government nor believe that it is an already existing socialist paradise. However, for the first time in history the socialist productive system is proving itself to be more productive than the capitalist one. The left should clearly support this and within China and the CCP support the left and the working class against restorationist forces.
Comment by Gav — 19 August, 2009 @ 1:59 pm
Jim- the designation of “workers state” by those who use it is not an indication that everything’s rosy. In fact, according to the theory, there is nothing to suggest that there may be many aspects of life in a given “workers state” that are far worse than in a given capitalist state-levels of poverty, democratic rights etc.
I would have hoped in any event that we would have got beyond the need to have this argument, which I feel was a bit sterile when I was having it 20- odd years ago.
Apart from anything else, there would be diagreement over which countries WERE workers states and why, - eg Syria and Burma were held to be deformed workers states by one tendency and not by others, Nicaragua was held by some to be a workers state because the state apparatus was controlled by a party with a working-class programme but by others (in the same organisation), not to be becasue the economy was not nationalised.
And then organistions that viewed Poland as a deformed workers state would disagree as to whether to support or defend Solidarity, the former lining up with those who called it state capitalist. As for Afghanistan…
One of the good things about Respect (of which I am not a member at present) and the SLP before it degenerated, is that people can work together on a project of building a new party while not having to agree on these questions.
The international issues that should be points of principle for a putative socialist party or coalition in this country are those where the British state, whether independantly, or through its junior partnership with the US state, are implicated.
As far as the rest is concerned- agree to disagree.
My view on the USSR etc is that, whatever you designate it, socialists have to take responsibility for it being part of the “family”, and therefore to ensure that the mistakes and crimes of the past are not repeated.
My suspicion about the state caps was that their theory was a way out of taking that responsibility. So why the red star?
Comment by Armchair — 19 August, 2009 @ 2:21 pm
My second last sentence shoul say ‘while defending the publicly owned part of the economy’.
Comment by Neil — 19 August, 2009 @ 2:23 pm
#108- I meant support or condemn Solidarity
Comment by Armchair — 19 August, 2009 @ 2:25 pm
I think the way that this discussion has developed speaks volumes for why the UK left is in such a poor state at the moment.
We start off with a focus on how we should be responding to today’s situation and then we rapidly deteriorate into a sterile debate over the precise class nature of China and the possible thoughts of a long-dead all-time loser.
Comrades, absolutely no-one you speak to out in the street will ever quiz you on either of these issues.
Comment by Communist — 19 August, 2009 @ 2:40 pm
I agree that these debates on the precise class nature of a state should not be a basis for dividing the left. #108 is correct when s/he points out that in the past this has not affected how people have judged events in practice. I.e. those supporting a degenerated workers state thesis were as much mistaken in welcoming the events in 1989 as those who adhered to a state cap position. What we need to get correct however is our understanding of how the Chinese government has got it right in large aspects of its economic policy and at how this is totally changing the political and economic global landscape.
Comment by Gav — 19 August, 2009 @ 3:10 pm
“No-one on the street will ever quiz you on either of these issues”. Whereas you will be frequently buttonholed with such questions as “What is exploitation?”, or “What is surplus value”. Please put aside the dreary economism.
One of the most significant current development in the world today is that an economy arising from a socialist revolution is growing rapdily in the middle of the deepest recession since 1945. And this supposedly isn’t worth debating, or of importance for contemporary socialist strategy?
To counterpose this to the problem of “unity” in the UK is crass. What do you say to you person on the street about how the government should deal with the recession?
Might you not point out that UK investment has fallen in the year end to the first quarter of 2009 by 14.7%, resulting in a huge loss of production and increase in joblessness. And that this drop is entirely down to the collapse of private sector investment.
You might add that some sectors are particularly dreadful, with the fall in transport of 34.9% and housing by 29.7%. As the market cannot address such falls, government action is surely needed. Nationalising such distressed sectors is the only way to restart such sectors now. And that it is precisely massive state investment in such sectors by the Chinese government that has allowed that country to expand such sectors despite the world recession.
But I suspect some of the posters here would have no answer at all, despite their insistence about being more in tune.
Comment by StevieB — 19 August, 2009 @ 3:25 pm
#96 “Has it by any chance escaped your attention that well over one billion people live under the poverty line in China,” Any reference for this claim?
Fortunately China’s Communist party does not view Marxism/Leninism as a formula or an “idiots guide to revolution”. They view it as a way of thinking, of applying cognitive thought to the problems and progress of society. China’s policy is toward creating a multipolar world, in opposition to a unipolar world dominated by US imperialism; without entering into a wasteful arms race or interfering in the affairs of other countries. Please note China does not have one single base outside its borders unlike the US which has over a 1000. China sends aid to Africa, Asia, South America and loans without the conditions that the IMF impose.
The General programme of the CPC states “China is at the primary stage of socialism and will remain so for a long period of time. This is an historical stage which cannot be skipped in socialist modernisation of China, which is backward economically and culturally. It will last for over a hundred years. In socialist construction we must proceed from our specific conditions and take the path to socialism with Chinese characteristics”.
This is realistic thinking and not romanticism. The Chinese governement have the great responsibility of caring for their people and building a new society. Who are we, who have not even managed to make a dent in our capitalist system to criticise the Chinese?
Comment by Alfie — 19 August, 2009 @ 4:01 pm
Reply to Redbedhead and Alfie
Redbedhead falsely asserts that I forgot the necessity of extending World Socialist Revolution as a key part of Permanent Revolution. It is ABC of Revolutionary Marxism that you cannot build Socialism in one country. The political counter-revolution of Stalinism was a reflection of Imperialist pressures on an isolated workers’ state. Imperialism also building up a Bourgeois class from 1990 in Russia by gaining the most out of Stalinism’s implosion is another proof you cannot build Socialism in one country. This Bourgeois class was subordinate to the Bureaucracy. That is why they utilised layers of Bureaucrats concillationist to them as an intermediate stage back to Capitalism. If the Capitalists could rule directly for themselves they would have dumped those Bureaucrats at another stage of Capitalist restoration.
Redbedhead confuses intervention by a Bourgeois state to salvage Capitalist firms; concessions made to the workers (NHS); and those societies where Capitalism has been overthrown. This author (Redbedhead) suggests that the NHS is an inter-Capitalist dispute. Then he goes on to talk about it being a battle over profitability. Do you defend the NHS against privatisation? It is a major gain for British workers because it contains in embryo a post-Capitalist society despite its distortion by the Law of Value. Trotsky argued in the Revolution Betrayed that when workplaces/industries are nationalised in a Capitalist society it strengthens the workers who work there. He argued Capital tries to limit those concessions except for when they are bailing out Capitalist firms because the workers are in a stronger position to challenge Capitalism. That is why Trotsky dismissed State Capitalism as impossibility not only due to Capitalist competition via the Law of Value but because workers would have just one enemy: - the State.
The dual crisis in Russia from 1990 of extreme Bureaucratic pillage and Capitalist inroads (especially from 1992 to 2000) which set back Russia for decades. Redbedhead in dismissing inter-Bureaucratic struggles and workers resistance to this dual crisis as inter-Capitalist ends up with an abstentionist position. As Trotsky said when writing In Defence of Marxism workers will not make new gains unless they defend present ones. Trotskyists seize the chances from more resources going into nationalised industries and social/public services in order to strengthen workers confidence to begin a fight which culminates in Political Revolution with social consequences. There are two examples of this I cited in my previous post.
There is a close co-relation between what happens in the workers’ states in relation to Imperialist countries and semi-Colonies. Despite the crimes of Stalinism millions of workers within the Imperialist countries looked to the Soviet Union as an alternative society to Capitalism due to a depression from 1929 to 1939. From the late 1940s with a boom in the major Imperialist countries Stalinist crimes played into the Liberal Bourgeois hands of salvaging Capitalism. At the same time millions of workers within these Imperialist countries knew about social gains of these workers’ states. Within the semi-Colonies the extension of Socialist revolutions into China; Indochina; Cuba and Nicaragua showed what could be achieved once Capitalism is overthrown.
There was enormous potential with the beginning of incipient Political Revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 but due to concillationist elements to Imperialism winning out, dual problems I referred to in Russia apply to Eastern Europe. The ex-GDR and Kosovo are Capitalist states because socialised property relations can only be re-established by overthrowing those Bourgeois states. Except for those two regions Capitalism has not been restored because the Stalinist Bureaucracies still rule Eastern Europe and ex-Soviet states.
Due to millions of workers within the Imperialist countries not understanding Bureaucracies in workers’ states when the Soviet Union broke up is one main reason why the Liberal Bourgeois ideological offensive that Capitalism had been restored in 1992. It was this ideological confusion which played into Blairism’s hands in Britain The majority of middle class layers in these countries made a major impressionistic mistake that Capitalism had destroyed Russia for a whole period.
By the late 1990s section of the middle class fearing a major world Capitalist depression arising from a collapse of the Tiger economies in 1997. There was also a rejection by these layers of Capitalist inroads into the workers’ states. By 1999 the anti-Globalisation movement attacked changes towards a market economy in Eastern Europe and ex-Soviet states. In the same year there was NATO’s bombing of FRY which many middle class elements feared would lead to World War 3. This on top of a financial crisis in 1998 caused intermediate layers within the Russian Bureaucracy to salvage Russia as a workers’ state.
By the Russian Bureaucracy stopping American Imperialism’s attempts at world domination such as opposing America’s bombing of Iraq in December 1998 and the rise of China as a major power shows clearly the Third World masses what is necessary to end Imperialist super-exploitation of their countries. America’s war in Iraq weakened them further. The depression within Western Europe and America through credit debt. Capitalism is so weak now there are beginnings of mass upheavals against effects of their crisis. This Capitalist crisis combined with the decay of Eastern European and Russian Stalinism is the objective basis for an eventual resurgence of Trotskyism.
Alfie defends not recognising Stalinism’s crimes in China. Due to Stalinist policies the 1925-27 Chinese revolution was crushed. After the Chinese Maoists ziz-zaged mainly between Ultra-Left adventurism and Opportunism. Despite of this in areas the Chinese CP’s militia ruled there were some gains for at least certain lower class peasants. Maoism only overthrows Capitalism because they would not make a deal with them. It was World War 2 with Japanese Imperialism being driven out of China and inflation which led to the Maoists overthrowing Chaing-Kai-Shek. This shows that objective circumstances in very unique situations within semi-Colonies can despite a counter-revolutionary leadership can lead a Socialist revolution out of self-preservation.
There were terrible Stalinist crimes in China such as tens of millions who died due to the Great Leap Forward policy. The Cultural Revolution weakened China culturally with great pieces of Art being destroyed. In order to confuse Liberal Bourgeois elements claim falsely that Deng broke from Maoism. Deng won out because the Bureaucracy could only go forward by trading which has been skilfully used to transform China into one of the major workshops of the world.
During the 1980s and 1990s sections of China’s Bureaucracy allowed certain Capitalist firms bad conditions for the workers working in those factories. Trotskyists oppose this as treachery because if the Bureaucracy was overthrown it would not be necessary to make those concessions to Capitalism by workers re-clawing billions of Yuan from Bureaucratic pillage. Trotsky attacked what he called “the friends of the USSR” who did not look at real contradictions in that country. If the Political revolution does not occur in a medium to long-term China will go through a similar 1991-Soviet-type crisis. Undoubtedly the Chinese Bureaucracy has leant from this but is subject to same objective laws.
Comment by Anthony Brain — 19 August, 2009 @ 4:18 pm
#115. God preserve us from this Trotkyist mumbo jumbo and thank heavens the Chinese and Cuban communist parties rejected the false logic of Trotsky long ago.
Comment by Alfie — 19 August, 2009 @ 4:35 pm
One sensible correspondent asked, quite reasonably, why a discussion about the future of the Left almost instantly degenerates into a tiresome, quasi-Biblical squabble about the deformed workers’ states or state capitalism. The response of another contributor is immediately to brush the question aside as ‘dreary economism.’ This stale retreat into jargon typifies the Left’s isolation from the concerns of the vast majority of people and its self-indulgent isolation from…well, reality.
I joined the SWP way back in the early Seventies. I was a member through some of the more productive initiatives such as the Right to Work Campaign and the Anti Nazi League. I was a member for twenty odd years before becoming disillusioned, not just with this section of the Left but most of the self-appointed Popes of Marxism I encountered. Too many preferred being a big fish in an empty pond rather than a sprat in a big ocean. There are many things I did or said as an SWP member which I find embarrassing or stupid. The times I remember with affection is when we managed to genuinely pull together people with different opinions around an issue of common concern.
I now organize a campaign to defend reading and libraries called the Campaign for the Book. We had a conference of 200 delegates recently and have been at the heart of the defence of Wirral and Swindon libraries. We now cooperate with publishers, trade unions, library campaigners and ‘book people.’ Our supporters come from many different political backgrounds but we cooperate around an agreed nine-point charter. We look for issues which unite, rather than divide us. We don’t kow-tow to clay-footed ‘leaders.’ We do what we can to protect important public services in difficult conditions. I think it is a sensible approach.
I honestly think that, if the Left is to have any resonance with ordinary people, it must speak their language and address their main concerns. If it wants to appeal it must cast aside self-indulgence and self-obsession and be realistic about its size and potential for growth.
Which brings me back to the Guardian article. Cast your mind back. It took about six weeks before there was a single protest in the City of London against the ‘masters of the universe.’ By that time there had been several protests in Washington where there must be even fewer radicals and socialists. At the moment the Left is divided and unimaginative and tends to put its interests before those of the people suffering the impact of the recession. The bankers and their political apologists have got away with vandalism on a quite colossal scale. Vast bonuses are issued and the majority of us will pay for this economic lunacy with our jobs and services.
The Left should be able to unite around a common platform and appeal to a substantial minority of people. Everywhere I go, former Labour supporters tell me how they throw things at the TV but then groan that ‘politically there is nowhere for me, to go, is there?” it is the most crass pessimism to say that in a recession politics moves right. The nineteen thirties saw fascism, the New Deal, the Popular Front, mass strikes in France and civil war in Spain, in other words many different outcomes. Part of the reason for the different responses was what people did on the ground.
If opponents of the free market jungle are to offer any sort of alternative they must be able to offer a non-sectarian, principled and accessible platform. If they can’t, they should just belt up!
Comment by alan gibbons — 19 August, 2009 @ 4:45 pm
#114 So you love China - fine by me!
#108 Thanks for your posts I if I have the time I will try to respond to earlier questions latter if I can.
I think that some comrades are very much mistaken about China in a great many respects especially the disfigurement description of it being a workers state; it’s not that or has it any infuses of socialism in short. So let me give you an example of what I mean here’s a part of an article from the Washington Post the heading was: “New Wealth Creates Class Divisions”
Deng Hong was 17, he led a company of Chinese soldiers into battle against the Vietnamese. By the time he was 20 he was out of the military and selling clothes. By 30, he had made millions in China’s go-go property markets. He divorced his Chinese wife, married an American, immigrated to the United States and bought property in Hawaii and Silicon Valley.
“I was,” recalled Deng, now 41, “living the American Dream.”
But Deng junked that dream and returned here to Sichuan province to pursue another. The reason, he said, was that becoming “big rich” in China was easier than in the United States. He was right: At last count he owned 35 cars, including a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, some Jeeps, a Corvette, several 600 series Mercedes-Benzes and a fat Lincoln Continental. He shuttles between two houses in Chengdu and a suite at his convention center. He recently purchased the rights to develop 100 square miles of land next to one of China’s national parks.
I’ve seen posts on here with people arguing that it’s a good thing for China to be integrated with capitalism; it’s worse than that its ruling class has encompassed it’s very essence, whole heart and soul.
Comment by Jim — 19 August, 2009 @ 4:53 pm
#101 `As someone who thinks, can I just say I’ve seen fewer less likely scenarios for China’s collapse than Thoughts’ in #99. There is zero prospect of the Guomindang allying with Falun Gong (who are emphatically not Christians, and have no political ambitions at all), and to introduce Al Quaida into the mix is simply buying into the Chinese regime’s echoing of Western Islamophobia.’
Chinese workers and minorities rightly protest the excesses, short-sightedness and hubris of the bureaucracy and I support them but they need a programme for political revolution. You can stand aside and uncritically applaud the bourgeois `democratic’ counter-revolution which will bring the most reactionary fascistic satrap regimes to power in China and which will deliver it dismembered and helpless to imperialism. But you don’t really care do you? You will happily join in the chorus of Western demands for `democracy’ in China. In your black and white world the collapse of the degenerate workers state would make things so much more easy for socialist propagandists at least on paper even if in real life it would strengthen the global reaction against socialism. We should support self-determination in China if that is what the workers want not uncritically and not on the basis of `constituent assemblies’ or bourgeois democracy but on the basis of preserving and deepening the 1949 over turn.
As for the Gong if you have ever seen one of their papers they are end to end anti-communism of the most bileous variety.
Comment by Thoughts — 19 August, 2009 @ 4:56 pm
1)Does anyone commenting here about China believe that anything you do or don’t do is going to make the slightest difference to what happens there, for better or worse?
2) Do you think we have anything to learn from the Chinese experience? - Need for a worker/ peasant alliance? Need to progress rapidly from a feudal economy to catch up with the big imperialist powers? Need to throw off colonial chains? Need to throw off feudal social relations? Need to make alliance with the bourgeoisie to fight off a genocidal foreign invader? Need to enforce the formal legal equality of women ? Armed struggle anyone?
They certainly didn’t need any lessons from us on any of
the above (thankfully!) Mao went against the advice of all sides in the Comintern.
Of course there was one Maoist leader who spent quite a while studying his “marxism” in the West. What was his name? Oh yes that’s right -Pol Pot.
The only positive thing the Chinese experience can teach us is the need for the involvement of masses of ordinary people in a conscious, organised movement to transform society, based on understandable, coherent and realisable aims.
Comment by Armchair — 19 August, 2009 @ 5:35 pm
StevieB, (113) I’m not advocating economism and there are plenty of responses we can make to people on the street who ask us how government should respond to recession.
How about: “Don’t give money to the banks, invest it in jobs and services.”
How about: “Don’t invade other countries.”
How about: “Provide first-class healthcare and education for all - with free, nourishing school meals for all our children.”
You know, some politics that could actually mean something to real people?
As opposed to a sterile, dreary and utterly abstract
debate about how to precisely define China and what Trotsky might or might not have said a hundred years ago.
If you say to someone in the street that China is an example to be followed, most of them will just be utterly bemused, and others will point to Tiananman Square, or the enormous numbers of deaths in China’s coal mines.
Comment by Communist — 19 August, 2009 @ 6:04 pm
Blimey. Anyone trawling thru this thread would have found the answer to Andy Beckett’s opening question ‘ Has the Left Blown Its Big Chance’ if this is representative of a significant section of the Outside Left. Sadly, at least in terms of the residual organised Trotskyite fragments it is all too representative. The dustbin of history beckons.
Meanwhile the BNP, UKiP and The Greens in different ways make electoral progress on a scale currently imaginable for the Outside Left. 200,000 leave the Labour Party of whom a miniscule percentage become active in the Outside Left. And the desperately noble occupations at Visteon and Vestas are built up to a significance that sadly does nobody any favours. ‘Blown its Big Chance’. Thats the undetstatement of the epoch.
Mark P
Comment by Mark P — 19 August, 2009 @ 7:41 pm
Communist- who on earth is going to say that China is an example to be followed in Britain? That’s why I despair that a post on the state of the left in Britain turns into a bizare debate on China. Perhaps we need a long march from Swindon to Wigan?
Comment by Armchair — 19 August, 2009 @ 7:53 pm
Of course it’s far easier to sound off with erudite prose about why China isn’t a workers state, is a workers state, is capitalist, what needs to change there etc (ie matters over which none of us have any control or ability to influence) than deal with what needs to be done in the place where we actually live.
Now clearly there are those who would say that we have no more control over or ability to influence matters here, so why not spend our time interpreting rather than changing China which is probably a far more interesting excercise than interpreting rather than changing Britain.
I call myself Armchair for a reason, It’s not something I’m proud of, but I want to see a reason to get out of the chair again and do something. This post isn’t giving it to me.
In answer to Peanuts, I promise to address the SLP question when I’m in a fit state to put my mind to it and apologise for not having responded previously.
Comment by Armchair — 19 August, 2009 @ 8:24 pm
#123 Cool your jets Mark. Capitalism has just had a massive heart attack and it is facing another. That is why it is puking up the fascist bile and more will come as it staggers towards its end. But you are right we must seek political and theoretical clarity as we build our movement. Sectarianism and opportunism are two indulgences that the workers can no longer afford or tolerate. An implacable programme for the socialist overturn of slave society and a flexible approach to forming blocks with others for specific practical ends will see us through. Now is not the time for an unhealthy bout of pessimism, it is not necessary, but for steely determination. It is begining.
Comment by Thoughts — 19 August, 2009 @ 8:32 pm
Armchair, I’m a bit confused by your post at (124), I’m specifically arguing that China is not an example to be followed.
Comment by Communist — 19 August, 2009 @ 8:56 pm
#125 Armchair don’t beat your self-up to much, you’ve made good contributions, which have made me think things through with I hope a more in-depth practical approach. I find it very hard myself after all the many setbacks and delusive expectations as if stumbling in this darkened room looking for the light switch. Over the last couple of day’s I’ve befitted a great deal myself from this unity site, to think that back when the SLP stared we didn’t have the ‘internet’as a tool and what a difference it has made, I really do think that it is possible for others to to say it’s time to get up, it’s time talk and it’s time to walk - together!
Comment by Jim — 19 August, 2009 @ 9:21 pm
Brief comment on whether power in Russia from one class to another.
I have just noticed from re-reading Redbedhead comments
attacking the Trotskyist concept that Capitalist inroads in
Russia were a move towards another rising class and that elements
of this class being expropriated is a move back towards
the Proletariat refracted politically through a Bureaucratic
Caste. Imperialism’s attitudte to different changes in
Russia confirms the Trotskyist analysis. They praised Russia
up when Capitalist inroads deepened and were hysterically hostile
when that major oligarch (which I cannot spell)ended up in prison
for years by trying to weaken the Bureucracy’s control of
Russia’s natural resources.
Comment by Anthony Brain — 19 August, 2009 @ 9:39 pm
To Armchair,
Thanks for keeping my questions about the SLP in mind as I thought you might not have read them ……Anyway,I look forward to your response as I am genuinely interested.
The idea of a long march from Swindon to Wigan mmmmmmmmmm?
Is there a People’s Alliance in Swindon or are they popping up all over the place like mushrooms ?
Now there’s an idea ?
Hope you are up and out of the armchair soon.You could get yourself a motorised automatic reclining one and tip your self into a swimming pool backwards…only joking !
Anyway,What would it take exactly?
To Jim
Good to hear someone say that they have benefited from the site.Likewise as long as there is genuine communication and I like what you said……..it’s time to get up, it’s time talk and it’s time to walk - together! Couldnt agree more.
Best wishes Peanuts
Comment by Peanuts — 19 August, 2009 @ 10:46 pm
Armchair.Are you actually strapped into the armchair as we blog?
Comment by Peanuts — 19 August, 2009 @ 10:47 pm
Off topic, I confess, but since everyone’s hanging around this thread, I though I’d abuse the privilege…
Youtube has a number of recent videos up implying that quite a few BNP members made their way to this year’s RWB Nazi love-fest in Codnor on UAF coaches. They’ve blacked out the faces of a number of people in the photos - so the implication is that they’re the BNPers and not anti-fascists.
Can anyone who went up there check these vids (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf7WqCBAVPI) to see whether there’s anything in this? If it were just one or two sneaking by I guess we’d have to accept that these things do happen, but with the high number of faces obscured, I can’t help but think this is a serious misuse of anti-fascist resources, not to mention a bloody great potential security threat.
They could be winding us up, but we need to look at this…
Comment by Another Dave — 19 August, 2009 @ 11:05 pm
Let’s get the discussion focussed back on the Left in Britain.
Certainly the Andy Beckett article has stimulated a great deal of discussion between non socialist and socialists of all kinds both here and on the Guardian comments page on it’s website and way beyond round on the internet so that is very positive in it’s self.
It makes you woneder.
The US “RENT A MOB” right, in the pay of the US pharmaceutical/ health insurance and “health…care” industry and big business have been promoting the idea of “socialism” like there’s no tomorrow and it’s not as if they arent all gobbling up the private contracts through the NHS trusts here and stitching up the so called health care reforms in the US in the first place is it?
Interesting times
And now after Boris the Dick head and Alan dickhead Duncan’s comments comes Douglas dickhead Hogg,”the Tory grandeeeeee” and moat cleaner extrordinaire’s comments that MP’s should be paid…..paid six figure salaries!!!
Comment by Peanuts — 19 August, 2009 @ 11:06 pm
So much for the ‘future’ of the ‘left’, if this is what it means.
Comment by Halshall — 19 August, 2009 @ 11:15 pm
#134 Halshall I think what Armchair, Jim and Peanuts are saying and in their diffrent ways is that the ‘future’ of the left has to be fought for!
And it must be built of course; no easy task - but not as negative as what you think it means!
Comment by Kate — 20 August, 2009 @ 12:04 am
# 134
Kate, with respect how do you know what I think it means ?
It certainly doesn’t mean a rehash of all the fossilised rhetoric of orthodox Stalinism or Trotskyism.
That as others including those you mentioned, has to relate to the W/C as they are not as passive recipients.
That would be patronising and a complete turn - off, as is much of the dross about China and Russia as ’socialist or ‘workers states’on this thread.
PS: Comrades for the first time in years I really want to get into the Guardian online comments ( on Beckett’s rather feeble article, which is weak but at least raises the question about has the ‘left’ a future’).
However I can’t get beyond ‘comments loading’ on my PC. Any ideas as to how ?
You might agree that’s why Visteon or Vesta could be significant as straws in the wind, or maybe more ?
The atmosphere at Marxism 09 may have been downbeat as Beckett said, with a ‘resignation’ that a watered down Keynesianism might have stolen the rhetoric of left reformism.
Well maybe, but a little more honesty about the destructive role of the SWP leadership in running Respect into the ground and its almost complete descrediting of any ‘left’ advance would not go admiss. And that is something that Callinicos amongst others should be aware of, but perhaps dare not admit.
Let’s hope that the recently announced ‘left’ initiative in the NW is a beginning, although it has to go beyond mere electoralism and link with worker’s everyday struggles.
Comment by Halshall — 20 August, 2009 @ 3:01 am
Communist- no, I didn’t misunderstand you. My point was/is that whatever is good or shite about China is largely irelevant to us in arguing for socialism in Britain, or discussing how to achieve it. I would expect bewilderment rather than questions about
Comment by Armchair — 20 August, 2009 @ 6:03 am
Tieaneman Square
Comment by Armchair — 20 August, 2009 @ 6:19 am
132 - not sure. Probably a wind up to be honest. I know that there wasn’t a coach from Harwich which they claim on the youtube site. A comrade drove and met up with a coach in Cambridge.
Comment by Steve — 20 August, 2009 @ 6:34 am
Well in thgat case Armchair I completely agree with you.
As I said at my earlier post (122), most people would simply react with utter bemusement to such a notion, as they would to quotes from Trotsky.
We need to put forward real political ideas to people and leave such “ideological baggage” behind us.
Comment by Communist — 20 August, 2009 @ 6:36 am
Thanks Kate for your comment…….that’s precisely the point…..we have to unite,we have to talk to eachother and work together.
How ever ridiculous this may all sound “we” and by “we” I mean the whole of the active and large amounts of the inactive Left need to wake up and respond insteead of carping on and on and on about “the past” and other minutae irrelevant matters and focus and get down to basics and refresh, revive and renew our thinking.
We need to unite around the vast amount that can unite us in terms of what we are for and against.This is posible and is happening as is the case of the Wigan Peoples Alliance which has as far as I understand it been build from below
We need to learn to put aside our differences and learn to agree to disagree.
We need to honestly acknowledge mistakes from the past and urgently work to repair “the deepseated damage” and move beyond this continual self destructive sectarian bickering,by showing solidarity, good will and generosity inorder to build trust and working cooperation.
We need to learn “to listen” to what people and eachother are saying and be creative and imaginative, learn to be FLEXIBLE(as against dogmatic) transparent, accountable and most of all BE DEMOCRATIC and not contniue to play any more silly fucker self destructive manipulative mind games over the control and dominance of any Socialist Left community workers peoples unity formations,coalitions or alliances which come into being.
We need to learn to acknowledge what works and what doesnt,what doesnt appeal and what does,cut out the out dead wood and start from basics.
If we get the foundations right then we are in business,if we screw up then we are truly stuffed.
Because to continue as we are ,57 ageing and different varieties in competition with eachother is madness,it simply confuses and alienates and results in total disillusionment both within and outside the Left.
Electorally it is complete madness, absolute madness for several different Left parties to be standing separately in competition with eachother in an election whether it be a local,regional, European or general election.The electorate just think what a joke.
What’s more it is not sufficient to simply stand at elections but to be listening and campaigning and working with people and groups on a local and community level.The potential is huge as long as we are genuinely prepared to do that.It wont be easy but we dont have any other option.The point is we should have been doing this for years.
We have such a wealth of talent and experience so lets use it to the benefit of all and drawin ever more talent and experience.
Similarly within TRADE UNIONS ..it is an absolute nonsense that there are so many competing Left groupings within unions.Again it simply is totally self destructive and all about control and dominance.
Essentially, we need a genuine historic pact based on Left unity and trust and cooperation between all the Left parties and groups and involving Left unions and active trade unionists ,shop stewards and trades councils.
Whether that is possible or even realistic it is impossible to say but we need something which sends out a loud and clear unmistakeable message to millions of totally frustrated, despondent,alienated and disillusioned workers and people out there both active and inactive desperately seeking an alternative to the wars,the greed and insanity and dysfunctionality of modern day neo liberal capitalist Britain as embodied by Brown’s totally fucked Blue Labour,the repugnant WE ARE NOW THE PARTY OF THE NHS tories and the slimey Libdems not to mention the EVER vile and ever disgusting racist and fascist BNP.
And for those that are sticking with Blue Labour or Labour or the Labour party then you are simply onto a thorough and utter hiding to nothing.Blue Labour has lost it and lost it big time.Having lost over 200,000 yes that’s TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND.TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND people..what a travesty!What a disgrace! masive resource
Comment by Peanuts — 20 August, 2009 @ 9:35 am
Thanks Kate for your comment…….that’s precisely the point…..we have to unite,we have to talk to eachother and work together.
How ever ridiculous this may all sound “we” and by “we” I mean the whole of the active and large amounts of the inactive Left need to wake up and respond insteead of carping on and on and on about “the past” and other minutae irrelevant matters and focus and get down to basics and refresh, revive and renew our thinking.
We need to unite around the vast amount that can unite us in terms of what we are for and against.This is posible and is happening as is the case of the Wigan Peoples Alliance which has as far as I understand it been build from below
We need to learn to put aside our differences and learn to agree to disagree.
We need to honestly acknowledge mistakes from the past and urgently work to repair “the deepseated damage” and move beyond this continual self destructive sectarian bickering,by showing solidarity, good will and generosity inorder to build trust and working cooperation.
We need to learn “to listen” to what people and eachother are saying and be creative and imaginative, learn to be FLEXIBLE(as against dogmatic) transparent, accountable and most of all BE DEMOCRATIC and not contniue to play any more silly fucker self destructive manipulative mind games over the control and dominance of any Socialist Left community workers peoples unity formations,coalitions or alliances which come into being.
We need to learn to acknowledge what works and what doesnt,what doesnt appeal and what does,cut out the out dead wood and start from basics.
If we get the foundations right then we are in business,if we screw up then we are truly stuffed.
Because to continue as we are ,57 ageing and different varieties in competition with eachother is madness,it simply confuses and alienates and results in total disillusionment both within and outside the Left.
Electorally it is complete madness, absolute madness for several different Left parties to be standing separately in competition with eachother in an election whether it be a local,regional, European or general election.The electorate just think what a joke.
What’s more it is not sufficient to simply stand at elections but to be listening and campaigning and working with people and groups on a local and community level.The potential is huge as long as we are genuinely prepared to do that.It wont be easy but we dont have any other option.The point is we should have been doing this for years.
We have such a wealth of talent and experience so lets use it to the benefit of all and drawin ever more talent and experience.
Similarly within TRADE UNIONS ..it is an absolute nonsense that there are so many competing Left groupings within unions.Again it simply is totally self destructive and all about control and dominance.
Essentially, we need a genuine historic pact based on Left unity and trust and cooperation between all the Left parties and groups and involving Left unions and active trade unionists ,shop stewards and trades councils.
Whether that is possible or even realistic it is impossible to say but we need something which sends out a loud and clear unmistakeable message to millions of totally frustrated, despondent,alienated and disillusioned workers and people out there both active and inactive desperately seeking an alternative to the wars,the greed and insanity and dysfunctionality of modern day neo liberal capitalist Britain as embodied by Brown’s totally fucked Blue Labour,the repugnant WE ARE NOW THE PARTY OF THE NHS tories and the slimey Libdems not to mention the EVER vile and ever disgusting racist and fascist BNP.
And for those that are sticking with Blue Labour or Labour or the Labour party then you are simply onto a thorough and utter hiding to nothing.Blue Labour has lost it and lost it big time.Having lost over 200,000 yes that’s TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND.TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND people..what a travesty!What a disgrace! masive resource
Comment by Peanuts — 20 August, 2009 @ 9:35 am
A recent poll in eastern Germany (and given credibility by the impeccably anti-Communist Der Spiegel) indicates that the majority of former GDR citizens make a much more positive assessment of that society than British ultra-leftists who write above.
The majority of German Marxists would, I suspect, make a similar assessment.
But why should they know better than British ultra leftists, who of course understand far more about China, Cuba, the former Soviet Union, South Africa, India, Greece etc, than the majority of Marxists who actually live and work in those countries (and whose views can conveniently be dismissed as ‘Stalinism’)?
The GDR report can be found at:
http://www.alternet.org/world/141157/homesick_for_dictatorship:_east_germans_liked_it_better_under_communism/
It is from Der Spiegel and written from a very hostile, anti-Communist, anti-GDR standpoint. Hopefully, this should make it easier to grasp for some contributors to the above debate.
Comment by Party hack — 20 August, 2009 @ 10:07 am
#135 Well That is exactly what I mean and I’ll tell you why. My living standards like thousands of others and I’m certainly sure; has dropped so far around my knees, sorry ankle’s that I can touch my feet with ease. I’m a member of what some people call the under class and have been for quite some time now.
Yesterday I received my dole money most of which is spent on paying the utility bills after which I’m left with about forty pounds for food, I smoke so it’s less than that.
I’m single so for me it’s not that bad if I do without things and I survive by regularly visiting food handouts in central London along with hundreds of others and the street homeless to whom I once belonged. And it’s because
of being street homeless that I find employers unwilling to give me a chance even though I’ve maintained a roof over my head for the last eight years.
I spend a lot of my time on the London streets; amongst the homeless and I consider myself to be part of that community, many of my friends are rough sleepers, although you wouldn’t know it, as they say appearances can be deceptive, but not with these people, every day I lean something new from them that in a small way gives me hope, for instance with a large Polish contingent living on the streets I hardly hear a word of discontent or any
racist exhortation or incitement something that I’m very proud of that’s why I love them all very much, and take my socialist message to them unashamed knowing that the dots joined will make a line!
Comment by Jim — 20 August, 2009 @ 10:29 am
#136 Just removing the bricks from my Lesbian underpants!
“Kate, with respect how do you know what I think it means ?”
Sorry that I’ve offended you, of course I don’t rally know what you think; just saying what I think but obviously I didn’t read you right then - OK
No such problem with Penuts and Jim then! I’m up for what you lads are up for! Oh and Jim many gay people end up on the streets and I think it’s particularly hard for us when that happens don’t you think so?
Comment by Kate — 20 August, 2009 @ 11:41 am
“MASSIVE” What kind of gross incompetence is that? What loss of massive potential !
If a viable and popular,cohesive and coherent Left unity alternative can come into being then surely,surely it can attract even a fraction of the “lost” two hundred thousand plus former Labour party members and a fair fraction of the millions of former Labour voters and the millions upon millions of people who dont even bother to vote any more!!
If the Morning Star wants to have greater meaning and relevance then it has to come out positively, clearly and unequivocally in support of such a Left unity formation and be genuinely representative and reflective of it.
I recognise it is improving it’s style and content which is to be commended but it still sees itself ,in my view, as the daily paper of the CPB and as such attempts to be constructively critical of the New Labour government as against clearly opposed to it and in support of a clear Left unity alternative.
Similarly,to those last remaining Left MP’s, socialists and those of the “genuine” Left as against those that “talk left” and use it as a mask within the narrow and squalid confines and overwhelming rotting stench of the so called Peoples Party within the equally narrow and squalid confines and rotting stench of the House of Commons.
When is enough enough?
I say this.
What complete and utter masochism is it that makes you want to stay in such a political party(sic)?
Do you really honestly and seriously think that you can regain ground for the Left within such a completely stitched up outfit.With what? Suddenly after the General Election thousands of people on the Left will rush to join or rejoin the Labour party.
I think not! Not now not ever !
WHAT WILL HAPPEN? The neo liberals in the New Labour sinking ship will suddenly start talking “leftish” as they are attempting to do as part of Brown’s so called multi contradictory and heavily over hyped and over played “tilt”.
What a joke!
Credibility is everything and New Labour have NONE and arent likely to gain any either in the near or long term future.
After the General Election defeat New Labour will simply dump Brown and anoint Mandleson and move evermore inexorably to the right inorder to out tory the tories just as the tories are trying out new labour new Labour as well as, unsuccessfully as it happens, out new tory themsleves…feet,shooting parties and the severely blasted bloody head of Mad Margaret on a plateau comes to mind.
As against what message would it send out, particularly to thousands of Left sympathisers and former Left Labour voters,members,activists and trade unionists? If……if the likes of Tony Benn,John McDonnell,Jeremy Corbyn and many others of the Campaign group,within the trade unions and Labour movement and beyond, at the time of the New Labour “conference”, in September in Brighton this year, were to actually leave en masse and clearly break with the party and align themselves publicly with a genuine new Left unity grassroots alternative at the Convention of the Left which “deserves” to be both massive and historic.
No more fig leaves,no more squaring circles!It simply doesnt wash.
We need to make waves and we need to make waves now,with initiative, energy, movement, coherence, focus, direction, dialogue and cooperation
We need:
A PEOPLES CHARTER FOR DEMOCRACY and for a NEW DEMOCRATIC CONSTITUTION,PEOPLES RIGHTS,JUSTICE and EQUALITY
A UNITED CAMPAIGN against ANTI TRADE UNION LAWS and for WORKERS RIGHTS.
We urgently need to build a popular mass movement against the racist and fascist BNP.
We need to rebuild a democratic diverse anti war movement.
We need a GREEN DEAL for jobs and an intelligent,clearly thought through strategy for a radical sustainable green socialist economic alternative transformation of capitalism and the causes of global climate change and chaos,global warming and the the greenhouse effect sand the wholesale destruction of the Planet.
We dont need a vast shopping list for a million and one hopeless,unrealistic and bewildering demands.
One last word…international solidarity
We need to develop greater unity and coordination within and between the solidarity movements with Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Paraguay,Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina,Chile and Colombia.
The Honduran people are in struggle against the US backed coup,resisting against increasing repression, targetted killings,disappearences,arrests,human rights abuses and violations and severe consorship and brutal curtailing of democratic rights
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………
THE CONVENTION OF THE LEFT
www.conventionoftheleft.org
Saturday 26th September
10.30am to 5.00pm
Brighthelm Church and Community Centre, North Road, Brighton
Capitalism in Crisis
The Left’s Response
One day special conference with contributors including Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Robert Griffiths (Communist Party of Britain), Caroline Lucas MEP (Green Party), John Maguire (Unite Visteon Belfast Convenor), John McDonnell MP (Labour Representation Committee), Pete Murray (NUJ) Kay Phillips (Respect Party), Matt Wrack (FBU) and more.
Saturday 26th September
10.30am to 5.00pm
Brighthelm Church and Community Centre, North Road, Brighton.
The Economic Situation - and Our Response.
The impact of the economic crisis on People, Planet, Peace and Politics
Seeking Unity in the current Cold Climate
The organisers of the Convention of The Left would like to invite you to the free one day conference in Brighton.
Last year the Convention ran successfully as the alternative to New Labour’s conference in Manchester. This year’s Convention event will continue the debates on the crisis of capitalism and Westminster politics and develop our ideas in response.
The wealth exists in society to pay for our essential needs - and the way the governments of the UK, EU and US have found trillions of Pounds, Dollars and Euros at the drop of a hat for the bankers proves what we have been saying all along.
And, as the continuing bloodshed in Afghanistan shows, there is still a limitless coffer for war and destruction.
The trouble is that our rulers want to use the wealth in society to prop up capitalism - which will inevitably lead to the same results all over again. They are buying themselves out of their crisis, but expecting the rest of us pay the price.
Recessions lead scape-goating, racism and the rise of the far right. The election of two BNP members to the European Parliament should be warning to us all.
Don’t blame the victims. The poor should not be punished for the crisis of capitalism.
We must provide the alternative. We look forward to seeing you in Brighton on September 26th to discuss how we make the green, left, socialist and radical alternative a reality.
Preliminary Timetable
Opening Planary: The Economic Situation - and Our Response
Four parallel sessions: The impact of the economic crisis on People, Planet, Peace and Politics
Closing plenary: Seeking unity in the current cold climate
Saturday 26th September
10.30am to 5.00pm
Brighthelm Church and Community Centre, North Road, Brighton
www.conventionoftheleft.org
Comment by Peanuts — 20 August, 2009 @ 11:51 am
To Halshall : “Comrades for the first time in years I really want to get into the Guardian online comments ( on Beckett’s rather feeble article, which is weak but at least raises the question about has the ‘left’ a future’).
However I can’t get beyond ‘comments loading’ on my PC. Any ideas as to how ?
You need to register with a paasword which will be sent to you ,verify it and you should be in within a few minutes.
Kate
On the subject of bricks and lesbian underpants…I’ll go and have a think about that one.Thanks Kate…great idea!
Of all the bricks in all the underpants….I had to choose this one…no, no,no it went like this……
The united left telepathy………….mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!
Comment by Peanuts — 20 August, 2009 @ 12:05 pm
One thing doesn’t seem to get mentioned: the role of the Web in expanding the left’s audience and making it possible to link up horizontally.
From the UKLN times, to now, when loads of us have Blogs (as opinionated people do..), and sites such as this act as clearing houses for events and debates, a lot has changed. Having papers, such as the Weekly Worker and the Morning Star on-line help as well. Thouigh we should try to buy them for obvious reasons.
The first time the Web really proved its importance round here was during the big anti-war protests up to and during the Invasion of Iraq. Mialing lists that si.
Now have otehr ways of cotnact, through face-book,a nd so on.
Don’t want to sound like some techno-utopian, but it’ s made a big difference, and this article fails to even begin to dela with this.
Comment by Andrew Coates — 20 August, 2009 @ 12:20 pm
Hi Peanuts,
I’m going to-do my very best and attend the one day special conference in Brighton will we be able to meet up by any chance?
Kate without the bricks, yes I do agree it’s very hard for gay people on the street I personally don’t know many but just to say there are a number of lesbian, gay bisexual and transgender support and advise organizations that do a good job if you need any more information I can help.
Comment by Jim — 20 August, 2009 @ 12:35 pm
And blogs come with spell-checks!#
Unlike when you post in comments’ boxes….
Comment by Andrew Coates — 20 August, 2009 @ 12:57 pm
Excellent point Andrew……..could you elucidate a bit more on how the Left can and could use the internet far far more effectively than it does at present? Horizontal linking up ?
Lessons to be learnt from use of internet to coordinate on a global level the mass protests against the war in Iraq on and around the 15th February 2003 ?
Twitter and facebook….tell me more as I not quite up to scratch on either of these and possible others but can see there definite uses and benefits.
The benefits and draw backs of blogging
As far as I am concerned, attractive website design is a crucially important matter and accessibility and user friendliness are points which were repeatedly made in a number of comments on the above article on the Guardian website comments board……ongoing but seems to have ben taken over by two indivduals slugging it out about I dont know what.
No offence intended but as you say “Now have otehr ways of cotnact, through face-book,a nd so on.” I have to agree….interesting spelling without a spell check
Comment by Peanuts — 20 August, 2009 @ 1:15 pm
Jim
Yes, we could meet up at Brighton convention of the Left……..Do you know that donkey just above that small sandy pebble on the beach just left of the ruins of the old Brighton pier we could meet near there ? Only joking!
(Regarding the long road to Wigan pier…… I’m defintely up for Wigan if I can get a lift, as these prices on privatised coach and rail nowadays are total insanity unless you can get in early or a fun run cheapy if they exist)?
Lets keep it in mind and firm up arrangements nearer the time unless you have a better idea.
So relieved Kate has unloaded those bricks…it’s huge weight off my mind.I dont know about how much weight it must be off her mind.Are you there Kate?
Comment by Peanuts — 20 August, 2009 @ 1:29 pm
I have sympathy with the points made by Peanuts (147) about the Morning Star.
The Star’s editorial line reflects the programme of the CPB, as endorsed by (non-dividend and single vote!) shareholders of the paper’s co-operative society at each AGM.
The Morning Star therefore already supports a wide range of broad-based movements and initiatives (including the Convention of the Left, People’s Charter etc.). Regular readers will also know that it carries features from leading left-wing and progressive figures in the Labour Party, Respect, SNP, Plaid Cymru, SSP, Greens etc. as well as the CPB.
Given the reality that the paper is still sustained to a far greater extent through the efforts of CPB members than through the members of any other party, I think the CPB should be credited with an approach which is far more open to left unity in this respect than those who concentrate on promoting papers closed to every other political tendency.
The paper’s policy of supporting workers and movements in struggle also means that members of the SWP, SP etc. who occupy representative positions can sometimes feature very prominently in the paper (Dave Nellist MP was never off the front page, Lindsey German is frequently quoted, Rob Williams appeared in numerous features and reports etc. etc.)
Yet I still meet plenty of SP, SWP, Green, Respect and other comrades who think the Morning Star should cover this or that campaign - but seem to make a point of not buying the paper, never contribute to its Fighting Fund … and then complain that it is not broad enough, is too close to the CPB, doesn’t contribute enough to left unity and so on (I am not necessarily aiming these points at Peanuts!).
The CPB has already shown itself prepared to share the paper in different ways, to a degree unique on the left in Britain. There have even been times in recent decades when the party did not have majority membership of the paper’s management committee.
But I can also understand why the CPB and other supporters of the Morning Star would not want to hand over substantial influence in the paper to others on the left who (a) give it no practical support; and (b) have no record of producing or sustaining a paper which opens its pages extensively to political views other than those of its controlling political organisation.
If even a fraction of the far left in Britain bought the Morning Star, or helped raise funds for it, the circulation would increase substantially, more pages could be published, and more staff taken on to enhance the content of the paper and its website.
That so many comrades still fail - even refuse - to do so says more about their sectarianism than it does about the CPB or the paper, I’m afraid.
Nevertheless, things have improved, the prospects for more unity on the left have brightened a little, and I’m sure the Morning Star will be an advocate and a beneficiary of progress in this direction.
Comment by Party hack — 20 August, 2009 @ 1:34 pm
#152. It makes organising for demos, any cmapaign, on a local level much easier (permanent hub), it gives the opportuunity to act as a noticeboard, and to make new contacts. This year, antiG20 demo, anti-BNP stuff. And anti-New Deal Workfare, Ipswich Unemployed Action - a Blog for which I was temporarily suspended from the Dole. Which gave us loads of publicity of course.
All local networks of leftists seem to be doing roughly the same. |PLsu we can get access to information easier - state documents, studies, etc. Not that this substitues for work on the ground. It reinforces it (especially if you live in a place where people live not too far apart in the first place).
#152. I do buy the Morning Star, sometimes (usually Saturday - a habit I had with l’Humanite Dimanche (weekend edition. It has got a lot lot better. Used to read it for the trade union stuff (am Branch Chair), now much wider issues. I promote it to those I know, particularly activists in the union - we in fact have shares (our Branch of UNITE that is). Even if I dislike the articles by Galloway and his dead-beat ilk there are plenty of other voices and - now - hard news. If it’s going to develop further depends as much on this contuining as on people buying the paper.
Comment by Andrew Coates — 20 August, 2009 @ 2:16 pm
Hi Peanuts,
The Road to Wigan Pier is not on for me this time just to far at short notice and I have commitments already made, but hope its a success and doesn’t get bogged downed to much with talk of electionism; Far too much of this in the past has killed off good beginnings, we need to build root to branch involving everyone who cares to make that important contribution no matter how big or small - all welcome I say. The roots are the most important part of any tree; if new shoots of leading activists sprout up good’, for they are out there we need to fined them. Most of all let not one ‘organisation’ dominate anything; we must learn that lesson or it will cost us again!
Just some thoughts! Oh and Andrew Coates is is making much reasonable sense of equilibrium if you know what I mean!
As for Kate, bricks and lesbian underpants - that’s just what’s needed ‘a good all-round sense of humour, that ingenuity to evoke laughter that can reach out to a great many can go a long way!
Comment by Jim — 20 August, 2009 @ 3:02 pm
#153 Peanuts,
“So relieved Kate has unloaded those bricks…”
LoL…..Best Wishes
Comment by Kate — 20 August, 2009 @ 8:36 pm
Of course the GDR had positive traits. Every country, up to and including Bob Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, has positive traits. One big problem on the left is “all or nothing” thinking - the idea that if the GDR was not a workers’ and peasant’s state (which it wasn’t) then it must have been a totalitarian hellhole (which it wasn’t). To put it another way - thinking the GDR was state capitalist is not to say that you think it was out-and-out evil, or cheering on Reagan in the Cold War.
Plenty of East Germans wouldn’t mind the GDR back, but I don’t think anyone but a few crazies want the Berlin Wall or the Stasi back. The point for modern socialism is how to argue for the good points of the old Eastern Bloc and against the bad points. It’s more difficult than cheerleading or proclaiming anathemas, which is why it’s worth doing.
Comment by Daphne — 20 August, 2009 @ 11:15 pm
Good point Nechayev, “If socialism so readily turns into ’stalinism’ what does that say about it?”
I think the problem is the “democratic centralism” method, which so easily turns into nothing other than a top-down dictatorship.
People have looked at the regimes within the various Marxist organisations and concluded that if that’s how they behave internally, then that’s how they’d operate if they ever got into power -who wants dictatorship?
If the organised left is to go forward, we need to find a better way of organising ourselves.
Comment by Communist — 21 August, 2009 @ 9:56 am
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/21/marx-politics-left-future
Callinicos replies in the Guardian today
Comment by JimPage — 21 August, 2009 @ 12:20 pm
Daphne 156 is sort of on the right track to point out, if somewhat defensively, that the first socialist state on German soil, had its positive points but she makes a concession to liberal thinking in dismissing the necessity of the Berlin Wall and, of course, the role of the Ministry of State Security.
A interesting antidote to bourgeois and left opportunist conceptions of life in the GDR can be found in this article in the impeccably bourgeois german magazine Spiegel.
http://mltoday.com/en/majority-of-eastern-germans-feel-life-better-under-communism-642-2.html
Comment by Nick Wright — 21 August, 2009 @ 1:00 pm
#72 et al said for example “Also, the fact that the SLP can still get the sort of vote it did in the Euro elections in spite of doing zero campaigning apart from a sad broadcast, and having virtually no public profile, is an indication to me, in part, that something remains from the work that was done back then.”
Well I too joined the SLP at it’s formation, attended the foundation conference and supported the principles and policies of the fledgling party but unlike some here am still a member. I really don’t know exactly what you expected back then? An swift, easy stroll to electoral success maybe? Unfortunately it was never going to be that simple. The policies and constitution were correct then and they still are, maybe that’s one reason the “SLP can still get the sort of vote it did in the Euro elections”.
We campaign where we can and we contest electorally too. We campaign where I live, I’m chair of my tenants’ association, a union rep at work and area level, a trades council delegate and active supporter of several single issue campaign too and known as an SLP activist. I’m in the SLP for the long run, as far as I’m concerned it remains the only show in town.
Comment by James — 21 August, 2009 @ 4:54 pm
Yes James, but it clearly isn’t “the only show in town” is it?
There are several other organisations on the left that the SLP, at its foundation, conciously decided not to engage with and, as a consequence, the Socialist Alliance (SA) was formed and the two ran against each other in the 2001 elections on identical programmes in what was a monumental waste of time, effort and money.
Surely what is needed is a unified left organisation, how can anyone think the existing state of affairs is preferable?
Comment by Communist — 21 August, 2009 @ 5:16 pm
James-
Where do you live just out of interest? No disrespect, but in my experience being a trades council delegate is something anyone can do- when I did it you had delegates from factions of the WRP etc. As for tenants association chair, union rep- good, but I don’t see how that necesarally relates to your membership of a party, sti less being an activist in various campaigns.
I didn’t expect an easy stroll, but if the SLP had been allowed to continue to develop along the lines it was doing in the first 2 years, I honestly believe it would be a minority mass party by now.
Comment by Armchair — 21 August, 2009 @ 5:49 pm
I think people like James in the SLP, just like others in left parties, must all be part of building a unified left.
But none of the exisitng groups can BE the left on their own. That’s a mentality that’s gort to go.
Comment by Communist — 21 August, 2009 @ 5:54 pm
The SLP is a sectarian force. Respect is the only serious left of labour party, unless you include the Greens.
Comment by little black sister — 21 August, 2009 @ 6:11 pm
LBS- are you in Respect?
From your various positons I assumed if you were in anything it would be Socialist Action.
I don’t know that you can even describe the SLP as sectarian. Personally I never encounter them apart from the odd contribution to this blog.
As I’ve said before, I’m sceptical that they have anything to contribute now, but then I wouldn’t rule anything out.
Comment by Armchair — 21 August, 2009 @ 6:50 pm
LBS, That’s just as sectarian as James’s contribution. Of course Respect is not the “only serious left-of-Labour force.” What nonsense.
Respect is a part, but only a part of the left. It may be your favourite left organisation, but you can’t simply pretend the rest of the left doesn’t exist - that’s completely ridiculous.
Just like James, you’re trying to pretend that part of the left you don’t like doesn’t exist.
A pre-requisite for any kind of progress towards left unity is that we try to be honest and address the exisitng reality, not just pretend that things are as we want them to be.
Comment by Communist — 21 August, 2009 @ 7:40 pm
I welcome the Callinicos article in today’s Guardian, most of which I find myself quite in agreement with.
There is one questionable element in it though;- he says ‘We certainly have a long march ahead of us.
partly because of our own divisions and mistakes, …….’
I wonder if this is (in part) a self-critical if oblique dig at the SWP leadership botch of the Respect project ?
Comment by Halshall — 21 August, 2009 @ 7:58 pm
#160 Hi James,
It’s great that you’ve made a contribution to this thread and most welcome. We must have crossed paths at sometime. I was also at the founding conference and if my recollection is correct we had two one at which the SLP was lunched (Conway hall) and the other (Camden Town Hall) when the EC slate was elected. I remember the first very well as we travelled from Doncaster on Buses laid on by I presume AS and organised with the help of his long time NUM secretary. I met Mick Rix for the first time on our bus and got to know him relativity well over time nice guy. It seems as if I’m name dropping better stop.
The thing is and as I’ve already said; the formation of the SLP represented at that time a huge steep for the working class a beacon of hope for Socialists and Socialism as apposed to New Labour. I for one have never held any regrets about joining and still remain very glad that I had the opportunity to work my f—–g socks off against New Labour in the 97 election. But I’m sad of the down hill run that became the lot of the SLP in the years that followed. To me the thing is to move on with the times and look for that window and that opening that will enable us to rebuild a movement that can hammer at the doors of capitalism not just in the one town but in all towns and city’s. And my only hope is that the reaming members of the SLP and the many hundreds who like me left - look kindly and see that it’s not an only game in Town approach that needed but rather a united class struggle!
Comment by Jim — 22 August, 2009 @ 12:47 am