The way forward for the left

 

Calling an article ‘the way forward for the left’ is probably a hostage to fortune. It suggests that I have answers when the truth is I’m not even sure I know all the questions. And, it risks disappointing those who might want to skip the waffle and jump to the final paragraph and find out where we go from here. Let me be honest then. I don’t have a magical, unifying idea that will make the left in the U.K. or anywhere else suddenly dynamic or successful. Sorry. All I can do is offer an idea of how we might survive in the here and now. If others agree with me that is a bonus. My most important disclaimer is this: beware of false prophets offering shortcuts. Especially those that involve you voting for them.

Politics is complicated

Just in case anybody is thinking we might get some insight from Labour’s frontbench, this is a brief summary from Corbyn-hating Alison McGovern: “Politics is complicated....Nostalgia on the left is a political disease. ...The only way to win is to focus on the future.....To govern is to choose, and if you can’t choose, you can’t govern. So, priorities must be clear – not just to us, but to the public, too.” Unfortunately, those priorities disappeared in a bit of fog that meant that not only were they not clear to the public, they didn’t appear to be clear to the author either. Hopefully, I can do better.

So, if we are thinking about how the left can go forward we have to be clear why it is not doing so now. After all, have we not seen in the past few weeks massive demonstrations, on a worldwide scale, against the genocide in Gaza? Have we not also seen in the U.K. mass protests against the Police and Sentencing Bill? Have we not also seen successful strikes against fire and rehire? How can I think that the left is not on the march? But these movements, as important and affirming as they are, are not a sign of our strength but rather show up our weakness. We are reacting. We are on the back foot. We are, to quote a phrase, fire fighting. We do not control the agenda. And, not just because of the media as some will no doubt argue. Do you think the ANC controlled the media in South Africa, or the civil rights protestors controlled the media in America during the sixties? In no battle that we have ever won, have we controlled the media.

The truth is that despite some illusions to the contrary the left in the U.K. is in disarray. Between 2016-2019 an uneasy alliance was formed to support Jeremy Corbyn’s attempt to turn a turgid Labour Party into a campaigning social democratic force. In the end, turgidity won. But one sure sign of the weakness of the left is that new so-called socialist parties are springing up like a manic whack the mole game. Added to Resist, we have the Northern Independence Party, the Harmony Party,  and now the Breakthrough Party. You can add these to the list of existing parties including the various versions of the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Labour Party, Workers Party and the former Militant, now Socialist Party. 

Space to the left of Labour

What they all have in common is that they are trying to inhabit a space they feel has been vacated by the Labour Party. I’ve outlined previously and in some detail why it is going to be difficult for a left of Labour party to make an impact. The fact is that Labour has a core vote of around 8 million voters. Not enough to win an election but enough that losing a couple of thousand to left parties will not damage their prospects. The vast majority of that 8 million will not abandon Labour at the next election. I could be wrong. I’d like to be wrong, but in reality I suspect that based on what is going on now SirKeith will, if still leader, lose with a vote something like 5 million less votes than Jeremy Corbyn managed in 2017. But, those lost votes will not propel any left parties into parliament. Most of them will simply abstain. To those who have joined those parties that will be seen as me being incredibly cynical and/or defeatist. But actually I would love to see a coalition of left parties genuinely challenging Labour. But, even if they could it is unlikely to change the nature of the system very much.

Let me be clear here. I am not hostile to the new parties or most of the old ones. I would probably vote for any of them if they stood in my area. But, that is partly because I don’t think who I vote for will make any great difference. Not because the electoral system is rigged, though it quite probably is, but because it is a bourgeois, neo-liberal parliamentary system designed to perpetuate bourgeois, neo-liberalism. That is why I am sceptical, not cynical, about the possibility of a left wing party winning parliamentary power. But, this does not answer the question set: what is the way forward for the left? If not in a new party, then could it be by remaining in the Labour Party?

Certainly not if it is to follow the likes of Alison McGovern for whom politics is too complicated to actually reduce to anything like a popular policy. But others are more optimistic about the Labour lefts prospects. Former Communications Director for Jeremy Corbyn, James Schneider, outlines what he calls a strategy to win. According to Schneider it is possible to use the membership to win progressive policies. This will be done, he says through “a formal alliance between the Socialist Campaign Group MPs, the left-led trade unions and Momentum” who somehow will drag a Labour establishment, devoid of any actual ideas but absolutely convinced that every time Jeremy Corbyn breathed another Labour voter turned into a Tory, into a programme of radical reforms. “We will be more likely to win policies we support, internal elections, selections of candidates for elections and perhaps even vote out general secretary David Evans at party conference this year,” Schneider confidently predicts.

Conference motions

Winning conference motions, if the members are allowed to even put them, may make people feel that they are winning, but the reality is that we had the entire manifesto in 2017 and 2019 and it made not one jot of difference to the right who used their control of the PLP and full-time bureaucracy to ensure that the left would never be in a position to implement it. This is not just a matter of a difference of opinion. Any objective analysis of the facts would tell you that there is simply no way that the left in the Labour Party is winning the party back. To suggest otherwise is not just wrong, but dangerously misleading.

The problem is that the emphasis on parliament as “the state” blinds us to the fact that parliament is just the legislative arm of the state with much power resting elsewhere. But ignore that inconvenient fact and consider how we get to use this state. First, we have to win back the Labour Party. That is as likely as my winning the next Mr Universe competition. But, if we could we then have to win an election. If we are trying to take control of, rather than radically transform the state, even if we could get a socialist government it would be lucky to last ten days. The state is not neutral, like a car just waiting for the right driver. The state, as currently constituted is a capitalist state. It is a vehicle to maintain the dominance of a small elite of super-rich capitalists. It is not set up to do anything else.

Of course it has taken on lots of other functions as capitalism has grown more complex but the reality is that the state at international, national and local level exists to support global capitalism. The only way that will change is through a social revolution, but I don’t think that’s what James has in mind. Labour is so encompassing in his thoughts that everything else seems secondary to it. His series reads like a long job application to be future Communications Director in a Starmer-Momentum Labour Party dedicated to socialism and the working class. And then a small boy in the crowd shouted “look the Emperor has no clothes...”

Left elitism

Not everybody sees Labour as an oasis of socialism in a capitalist World. Not everybody sees the Labour left through rose tinted spectacles. Natalie Strecker takes issue with a left that engages in: “virtue signalling, [and] condescension”. James should have read her before he wrote his series! Describing her own experience of the left Natalie says: “All too often there seemed to be a club on the left that you could not join if you had not read all the books and did not know the difference between a Marxist, a Trotskyite and a whole number of other distinctions.” Is she right? Can anybody on the left put hand on heart and say they have never been at a meeting of the left with people who seem more concerned to show you how much they have read than just talk to you as a person? The Labour movement, and not just the Labour Party, can intimidate people out of activity by making them feel uneducated and unworthy. 

Political parties, whether mainstream or of the left replicate, despite their best intentions, parts of the capitalist culture that most of us want to escape. They create bureaucracies which rather than encourage radicalism start seeing their own survival as the goal of the party. They create elites who feel that it is in their gift to elevate some people and denigrate others. They, inevitably, create factions because the very nature of the parliamentary system we remain obsessed by is adversarial. Even well meaning, left wing parties do this because they have structures which are focussed not just on getting things done but creating leaders, committees, delegates, all based on adversarial principles of in-groups and out-groups. Political parties may well turn out to be part of the problem, not the solution.

I realise this is not what people want to hear. Hell, not so long ago it was not what I wanted to hear either, but I’ll say it again because I think it is highly relevant.  The electoral system is an integral part of a capitalist social order. It is set up to support, for want of a better phrase, big business. Parliament is simply the political wing of the economic order. It is there to provide legitimacy and to enact laws that make the smooth running of capitalism possible. If capital gets worried about the functioning of parliament then it has, well, bodies of armed persons to close it down. As it does on a regular basis in other countries.

We are doomed

Which might make things seem particularly futile. After all, if we can’t win political power we are doomed, are we not? Not quite. Societies don’t change because of parliamentary elections but despite them. By absorbing all our energy into parliament, and mini-parliaments (councils) we can leave insufficient for the struggles that really matter. That might sound as if I’m saying that fighting in elections is a distraction from real revolutionary activity. That is not my intent. At some points fighting elections certainly can be a viable option. It can, if done successfully, raise issues and the profile of the left. But, getting a couple of hundred votes is humiliating and potentially damaging for the left. It paints us as losers and a much smaller minority than we actually are. So, should we put our energy into revolutionary activity instead? Truth is I’m not entirely sure what such activity would look like. Self proclaimed revolutionaries spend a lot of time learning “the line” and promoting it on paper sales, is that revolutionary activity? Possibly, but probably not. Okay, so what should we do in the here and now? What is the way forward for the left?

Well, in my opinion and you are perfectly entitled to have a different one, we start by recognising that there is not one unified left. There are a collection of individuals all who at some level feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with our current society. Those people belong to different genders, ethnicities, sexualities, nations, parties, and every other device you can think of to divide us. Some are well read, some not. Some think they have all the answers. They don’t. What we all share is a belief in change. 

To go forward we have to start building organisations that challenge capitalist norms. Not just norms of inequality but of elitism. Left elitism, as Natalie Strecker reminds us, is no less pervasive than right elitism. We need to build organisations that nurture people, that make them feel valued as individuals and members of the collective. Organisations where people can make mistakes without being castigated and piled on. We need to stop finding ways to divide ourselves on whatever spurious grounds are in fashion, and find ways to work together. That means listening to people’s experiences but taking those individual stories and understanding them as part of a wider narrative of inequality. The left is not going anywhere unless it loses a growing tendency to divide itself like a parody of a Monty Python sketch and concentrates instead on what unites us. Concentrates on the real battle not the phoney wars that some people get so excited about. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether you are inside a political party or, like me, reject the value of parliamentarianism, we all want the same thing. That thing is socialism, because that is the negation of capitalism which is at the root of most of the ills that confront us. I’m continuing to promote a vision that involves creating socialism in the here and now, if you would like to join me get in touch.