left | ukwatch.net

Searching for the Left

eddie — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:25:00 +0000

Faced with a Labour government which is resolutely set on ensconcing itself as a centre right nationalist party, it is time for the left to start making new connections.

Compared with its counterparts in Continental Europe, the organised left in Britain has been unusually stable. Founded in the late nineteenth century, twenty or thirty years before the British Labour Party, most European socialist parties underwent at least three great convulsions in the twentieth century: they were split by the Bolshevik Revolution, driven underground by fascist dictators and reinvented after the collapse of Communism. In this sense these parties have a history written into them, which acknowledges that the world can change and that political formations are not immutable. Even now, the map of the European left is shifting, with realignments under way in both Germany and Italy. Britain, however, remains an exception to the European norm. Here the left has revolved around a single political formation, the Labour Party, which has been largely untouched by any of the convulsions, partly because of its late formation and partly out of simple contingency.

The mirror image to Labour’s stable position on the left is that of the Conservatives on the right. For almost a century, Great Britain has been a two-party state in which power alternates between left and right. Indeed, if one substitutes Liberal for Labour, this system has dominated British politics since the mists of time. The first-past-the-post voting system has reduced other parties to electoral impotence, whilst the ‘broad church’ posture of the two main parties has neutralised, if not absorbed, the extremes on either side.

The current national political scene might, superficially, suggest that this two-party system remains in full flower. However, this is not the case. The high point of two-party dominance was in 1951 when Labour and Conservatives between them polled 98 per cent of a popular vote of over 80 per cent of the electorate. Since then there has been a slow but steady erosion of their position. In 1966, the Labour/Conservative vote totalled 90 per cent of the total, taking 97.8 per cent of the seats on a 72.9 per cent turnout, whilst comparable figures in 2005 were 67.5 per cent, 85 per cent and 61.4 per cent. Two stark conclusions follow. First, it is now possible for a party to obtain a clear parliamentary majority with the votes of little more than one-fifth of the adult population. Second, the gap between the aggregate share of the vote of the two main parties and their share of seats won has grown significantly. The stability of the two-party system has become precarious.

In a parallel development, the broad-church nature of both parties has also diminished. The Labour Party shows this more obviously, with its socialist left component reduced in both numbers and influence to humiliating obscurity, but the Conservative Party has also become much narrower in its political spectrum, both to the left (where Labour has hoovered up any spare ‘wets’) and to the right, where both the BNP and UKIP have taken over. Again the effect is to destabilise the two-party system.

The great political achievement of the Blair/Brown regime has been to impose the policies of neo-liberal Thatcherism on the Labour Party whilst retaining electoral power.(1) I want to take this as read and to focus on the current political problem faced by the new leader, Gordon Brown: how to manage the shift in political position required to cement Labour as the dominant electoral force in Britain. In particular, I want to consider three ways in which the political base of Labour has moved, and the implications of this for the left. These concern, respectively, the diminished strength of British trade unions, the decline of the socialist tradition and the hollowing out of the British state.

The shifting context for Brown

Historically, trade unions have played a more prominent role in the British labour movement than in Continental Europe, where their support has been welcome, but not decisive, for the parties of the left. They have performed two distinct functions: as a politicising agent within the working class, and as a prop for the Labour Party leadership, which, for most of its history, has been to the right of most of its members. These roles have often been contradictory, but until the last two decades most of the left, both inside and outside the Labour Party, has argued that the ruling right wing could be defeated if grass roots trade union members were properly mobilised. In the mid-1960s, this was a realistic prospect and was, indeed, pursued with some success; forty years on, it has vanished. The unions are, numerically, much diminished. Their previous grip on large parts of the private sector has all but disappeared and continues to decline, whilst their membership is ageing. Union density is now amongst the lowest in Europe. This is a long-term trend which began in the Thatcher years, but has continued unabated throughout the whole period since 1997.

That this is a tragedy for British workers is undoubted. However, the political implications of this long-term decline have yet to be assimilated – at least on the left, for it is clear that Brown and Blair had long taken them on board. Nowadays, the unions do little more than service their dwindling band of members and their support for Labour’s leaders is largely undiminished, unchecked by countervailing pressure from below. Hence, any left project which involves attempting to shift the unions to the left has effectively disappeared. If anything, the political issue has reversed; the left now needs to find ways to assist unions to recover something of their previous vigour.

The second shift in context is more subtle but, in its way, more important. In the mid-1960s, the Labour left held on to a broad moral and intellectual hegemony both inside the Party and also outside in the wider left. This ascendancy was based around ‘socialism’ as it was then understood. In Eley’s words:

For roughly a century between the 1860s and the 1960s, the socialist tradition exercised a long-lasting hegemony over the Left’s effective presence … If the Left was always larger than socialism…socialist parties also remained at their indispensable core.(2)

Eley writes of the European left. In Britain, much of the membership of the Labour Party plus that of the Communist Party was the essential socialist core of that broader left.

In 2008, this central hegemony of socialism as the normal language of the left and as a sheet-anchor on the ultimate practice of Labour’s leaders has disintegrated.
Again in Eley’s words:

Socialist languages of politics, socialist models of organising the economy, socialist projections of the good society, socialist ideas in general have all been catastrophically delegitimized … Socialist ideas now have a more embattled and less legitimate place in the public discourse than one might ever have anticipated even two decades before (ibid).

I am not arguing that this is a good thing; I am simply stating a fact about the place which socialism now has in political discourse even on the left. It has no pull, even a residual one, on the Labour leadership, who are now evidently free to pursue whatever policy seems most fi tting their own designs; and it has little attraction within a wider activist left. Yet, and this is something that becomes startlingly obvious as one moves around the various public debates centred on the Labour Party, the left within that party as well as various fragments of the old socialist groups seem largely oblivious to this fact.

The third shift in context is the overall hollowing out of the British state and of the two-party system which has sustained it for so long. In the mid-1960s, Britain was a unitary state governed within the framework of a two-party system, historically largely dominated by the Conservatives, but with Labour the only credible and legitimate opposition and, within Labour, a socialist left which could visualise itself as being a government-in-waiting. This system has almost fallen apart. Scotland and Wales have started down paths of a legal national identity, whose future route is uncertain, but which has already given their nationalist parties a leading role. In England, a slow edging towards a more pluralist political structure has given a third party an increasingly prominent role, despite the obvious unfairness of the electoral system. All this has taken place against a background of growing disillusion with the political system as a whole, refl ected in the decline in electoral turnout.

The destruction of the socialist left inside the Labour Party, together with the effective demise of its socialist outriders, has left the British left leaderless and without any coherent political strategy. However, Gordon Brown, as he searches for the political base necessary for an extended period in power, also has serious political problems, despite his success as co-author of the project to shift the policies of Labour into the new centre ground of the neo-liberal hegemony.

The first is that the British state is slowly falling apart, with the effective separation of Northern Ireland, the slow-motion departure of Scotland and a slower, though still palpable, process in Wales. It remains uncertain just how these three national situations will evolve. None is near completion but each has acquired a momentum which will now be hard to slow, though it may well stop short of full independence. The formation of coalition governments where once there was effective single-party domination is one of the milestones along the line, a result of the various kinds of proportional representation which now exists in these quasi-states. This by itself offers a serious, if as yet muffled, challenge to the first-past-the-post system which now so distorts Westminster elections.

So far, Gordon Brown’s response has been to try to muster political support around the idea of ‘Britishness’, one of those weasel words whose real and surface meanings diverge. In this case, ‘British’ actually means English, a none-too-well concealed drive to give Labour the majority in England which it will increasingly need, but so far lacks, as the Celtic nations move towards greater autonomy. That he should adopt direct from the BNP the slogan ‘British jobs for British workers’ is evidence for just how seriously this issue of Englishness is taken by the Brown cabal.

The second problem is that the drop in electoral turnout, combined with the steady advance of third-party voting, threatens to become a crisis of political legitimacy if it continues much further. It should be emphasised that both these trends, and in particular the former, have been a feature of the Blair/Brown regime, notwithstanding claims that in 1997 it embodied the popular will.

The third problem is more complex but no less serious. Brown and Blair drove New Labour to adopt all the clothes of neo-liberal capitalism, so that now Brown’s central political position is essentially that of a right-centre (English) nationalist party. However, this terrain is already occupied by a previous incumbent who is unwilling to vacate it and still loosely ‘owns’ it. To appreciate this it is only necessary to note how often Labour is said to have outmanoeuvred the Conservatives by occupying ‘their’ territory. In other words, Labour is still seen as a party which has taken power, rather like a cuckoo, by stealing another’s nest. (David Cameron is now attempting to emphasise this by his refrain that Brown simply ‘steals’ his policies.)

The result is a political system which has shifted from apparent stability to one perpetually unstable, as potential voters swing from one centre-right nationalist grouping to the other, depending on which manages to push the right buttons at the right moment, whilst others simply turn away from voting on the entirely rational basis that there is no difference between the only two parties which can achieve power. The extraordinary shift in the opinion polls in October 2007, apparently because of one small policy claim on inheritance tax, is a vivid reminder of this. Neither to the left nor to the right is there a real alternative to this duopoly – at least not in England – though there have been lurches in specifi c constituencies towards both extremes (Respect, UKIP and the BNP), as well as towards independents like Richard Taylor in Wyre Forest, which suggest that there is some repressed desire to find one. The Liberal Democrats also waver around the centre, uncertain which way to swing as they seek to offer alternatives to both sides, sometimes taking away their supporters only to find them turning back as the specific issue that attracted them, such as opposition to the Iraq war, fades.

Brown’s central problem is that New Labour achieved power in 1997 essentially by offering a new take on Thatcherism. In this it had considerable success. However, sharing a house with another tenant means that, ultimately, the other partner will have their day. If politics becomes simply a struggle between the Ins and the Outs in which, inevitably, the labels are reversed at regular intervals, then New Labour is doomed to defeat; the only issue is the precise timetable. On this inexorable law Brown is now hung. His only way out is to claim legitimacy over the premises now shared with Conservatives and to move them out, something that requires them either to relinquish it or to be erased from it. In this endeavour he has two key advantages: fi rst, he has power, that is he has the ability to offer real political office and honour; and second, he leads a party which is, apparently, unsplittable, whatever policies are espoused. Ironically, given Labour’s history, the Conservatives are now more vulnerable in this respect because the internal structure of the party, whilst hardly democratic, does offer much more room than Labour for disaffected groups to organise into factions, and there are a number of issues – notably Europe, but also others on social policy and the environment – over which the factions are bitterly divided. The electoral fright occasioned by the rather absurd UKIP shows up this fragility. This factor may prove decisive, as the open disputes within the Conservatives in summer 2007 showed, even if they superfi cially united under the potential threat of a snap election. Brown’s great disadvantage is, of course, events – in particular, the rapid deterioration of the economy or any support for the USA over a new war, this time in Iran.

In first, tentative steps, Brown has begun to lay out his stall. In policy terms he will stay rock-solid on the nationalist centre-right whilst, politically, beginning to offer a home to disaffected or possibly just bored members of both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. He will play tunes on the theme of being the big-tent party and hope that, at a suitably opportune moment, he can turn over the national unity card, split the Tories by filching a chunk of their MPs and possibly some of their leadership, and humiliate the Liberal Democrats by doing the same thing with them. Until the moment comes, he will continue to appoint non-party business leaders such as Digby Jones as junior ministers, and assorted Tories and Lib Dems in the hitherto unknown constitutional role of ‘government adviser’.

This will be a hard trick to carry off. If successful, it may come to be called in future political science textbooks an inverse Ramsay Mac. On the other hand, it could fail. Either way, it is a manoeuvre that Brown is almost forced to try as it offers a solution to all three of the political problems noted above. A centre party reorganised on such lines would almost certainly retain political legitimacy by securing a large share of the popular vote – at least at its first general election – and could thus fend off the tricky question of electoral reform. It would obtain such a margin most securely in England and would allow Scotland and Wales and their beleaguered Labour Parties to sail off to whatever destination beckoned, defusing the national question at least until specific and unavoidable demands for further national autonomy were tabled. But the one issue which Brown almost certainly ignores is how the left in his own party would react to such a manoeuvre, however adroitly carried through. The Labour leadership election debacle showed just bereft is the Labour left of any leader who might threaten defection. However, the political imperatives of Brown’s position may yet open up new possibilities for the wider left.

Where is the left?

The process of political hollowing-out discussed above, combined with the catastrophic, if partially self-inflicted, defeats of the 1970s and 1980s, have produced a left in Britain which is scattered, fractious and unable even to recognise itself except by largely meaningless labels of affiliation. The key, though apparently paradoxical, question is just what constitutes the left and where it can be found. It is, in other words, a process of self-discovery. There are many over-lapping answers to the former question of course but the following may serve:
The left encompasses those who believe:

that, in general, collective responses to general social, environmental and economic issues are to be preferred to individual ones;

that, in particular, market mechanisms are undesirable ways of providing public services;

that these public services include education, health, welfare, policing and national security, as well as some other areas, which might include some natural utility and transport monopolies and some aspects of housing;

that health and education should be free to all without discrimination;

that practical and functioning forms of democracy should exist in all areas of social activity, including the economy;

that forms of ownership other than private are preferable in many sectors of the economy;

that all citizens are entitled to receive a basic level of financial support from the state if they are without personal resources;

and that equality is a public good in its own right.

There is plenty of scope for the argument and dispute traditional on the left over these, and they could be expanded, particularly at the international level, but they encompass what most would think of as forming the broad left.

It should be clear that this left is wider than what, historically, was called the socialist left, whose core belief was that society operated under a general social and economic system called capitalism, which could and should be replaced by an alternative system called socialism, both systems being essentially defined by ownership. It needs to be recognised that a significant part of the left, as defined above, is resistant to the very idea of overarching systems and does not recognise any neat dichotomy into capitalist and socialist.

It also needs emphasising that much of the left now lives inside political areas which are by no means ‘owned’ by the left. There is left participation in areas such as nationalism, the environment, feminism, the peace movement, and a whole range of international issues such as resistance to Israeli oppression of Palestinians or the war in Iraq, as well as dozens of local and regional initiatives, but none of these are wholly of the left. The environmental movement is a key example. Although the left has a prominent role in the Green Party, it is by no means the only grouping there, whilst figures such as Zac Goldsmith have perfectly sustainable environmental credentials whilst being, politically, on the right.

So where does this left now reside? Perhaps a division into five, overlapping sectors is helpful. First, there is a core of left-wingers within the remaining membership of the Labour Party, including some elected Labour representatives. Second, there is a left fraction of a number of other parties including the three nationalist parties, the Green Party and, yes, the Liberal Democrats and which will also include some of their elected representatives. Third, there are the members of those small socialist groups which still retain an explicit attachment to the Communist or Trotskyist parties of the past. Fourth, there is a body of individuals who have been members of the Labour Party as well as those Communist or Trotskyist parties, who retain left ideals but have detached themselves from active national politics. Fifth, and probably the most numerous, there is a body of individuals who are active in some form of political action, both local and global, and who regard existing political formations at least with scepticism and often with downright hostility. Some of these actions are descendants of the local campaigns once organised by Labour and Communist members but now largely detached from any organised political body. Others are part of wider and looser assemblies such as the anti-globalisation alliance.

Just how many people could be assembled under these headings is impossible to know; a personal guess would be around a quarter of a million activists, with the majority in the last two categories. In electoral terms, a left platform based upon the above principles might be able to get ten to fifteen per cent of votes cast in most constituencies. But numbers are, at least for the moment, largely irrelevant. The task faced on the left is how to fashion some kind of network from these disparate groups, in which they can acknowledge each other and engage in debate about political strategy, without attempting to denigrate the choices that have led to individual places of residence, but with the objective of developing some discernible impact on practical politics. This is not a new project. It first surfaced forty years ago in the May Day Manifesto group and re-emerged nearly thirty years ago in Rowbotham, Segal and Wainwright’s vision of a left Beyond the Fragments; and there were efforts in the 1990s to form some kind of red-green alliance which effectively amounted to a new kind of left unity. All failed, though not without some initial success. Why should any new endeavour succeed now?

The negative answer to this is that there is really no alternative. Efforts to work through the Labour Party have failed whilst the left outside the Labour Party has fragmented in all directions without any clear purpose. The positive answer has to be that Britain is approaching a general political conjuncture which, as the previous analysis argues, is unstable and likely to give rise to seismic movement as the great, colliding, tectonic plates of Labour and Conservative, moving over rather than confronting each other, fi nally give rise to sudden shifts. In this sense, the Brown project, which I described above as being essentially forced, may be precisely the political opportunity the left needs. The fi nal, explicit centring of Labour, the moment when the cuckoo tries to change into a blackbird, is the time when a clear left formation could emerge, just as a clear right formation may also develop as the
Conservatives split up.

The problem with this is that, although the broad idea of such a shift may be accepted, its timing and scope remain in the hands of others, in particular a notoriously secretive and manipulative other. Perhaps the key is that the next general election is likely to be both close and chaotic; chaotic in the sense that it will have a great variety of dynamic strands running through it whose interaction is very hard to forecast. Many on the left voted against Labour in 2005 on an anti-war basis and some of these have permanently changed their affiliation to other parties. Others will return to voting Labour on the age-hold grounds of keeping the Tories out. Still others will never have left Labour though retaining grave doubts over the New Labour project. Others have already voted for other parties such as the Greens or Respect. In Scotland and Wales, the formation of nationalist governments, albeit on a coalition or minority basis, means that old voting patterns are being dissolved, with many on the left choosing to fight their corner inside the nationalist parties. These are just the confusions and dilemmas existing on the left. The more Brown pursues his big-tent theme, opening up to all and sundry on the right, the more confusion will reign there too.

Organised and systematic tactical voting based upon simple criteria for being ‘on the left’ could have a swift impact in such circumstances. There is no possibility that these disparate elements can be reconciled into any common voting at a national level at least at the next election. However there does exist a chance that the electoral dilemma can be recognised and a common approach worked through locally in some cases, whilst the very process of recognition could be a major step on the road of reconciliation.

Where to begin? Perhaps the best approach is to change the metaphor used to describe left political action, which has traditionally been dominated by the quasi-Darwinian slogan that from acorns do big oaks grow – though only one acorn succeeds, crushing out all the other seedlings from failed acorns. Instead let us turn to the metaphor of rain-making by seeding clouds with silver iodide particles, no one of which is decisive but in which all are necessary. The left exists in Britain as a large amorphous cloud without measure and without purpose. Just what would happen if it could all shift in one direction is hard to know but it would certainly be spectacular. We should take as our alternative slogan that from many drops a flood can come.

This essay is a summary of a longer appraisal by David Purdy and Michael Prior on the definition and historical role of the British left, which can be seen at hegemonics.co.uk

Notes

1. A full analysis of this process can be found in Feelbad Britain, available at
hegemonics.co.uk.

2. G. Eley, forthcoming.

3. Ibid.

Nothing is More Important

eddie — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:20:57 +0000

Jon Cruddas and Nick Lowles argue that the rise of the far right presents a challenge that the left has so far proved unable to meet

There is a tangible shift occurring in British politics. Gone are the days of traditional class politics, when the working class voted en masse for Labour and the more privileged for the Conservatives. A new force is emerging, which will, if left unchecked, prove disastrous for both Labour and the left in general.

Magnus Marsdal’s article talks about the changing politics of Norway and finds comparisons with the rest of western Europe. It is a phenomenon that is also taking place in Britain, albeit a few years later than in some other countries.

The British National Party (BNP) was formed in 1982 out of an earlier split within the National Front and for many years it languished on the fringes of politics. In 1999 Nick Griffin became its leader and his more political and media savvy approach enabled the party to exploit rising racial tensions in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in the summer of 2001. Since then, against a backdrop of rising Islamophobia, a growing eastern-European migrant workforce and New Labour’s fixation with Middle England, the party has risen steadily. It now has 55 councillors and last month secured a seat on the London Assembly.

And all this in a period of supposed economic success.

The BNP has long been dismissed as a cranky fascist party, made up of thugs, criminals and Nazis. While it is true that the leadership has its ideological roots in fascism, it is time we had a better explanation for the party’s rise and appeal.

Society in Britain, like much of the industrialised world, has become dislocated over the past few decades. Globalisation and the increasing dominance of international finance and corporations have shifted power far away from local communities. This, coupled with the loss of empire, Britain’s changing place in the world and even the possible break-up of the United Kingdom have all challenged the identity of many, particularly those towards the bottom of the economic ladder, who naturally are more concerned about change.

Politically, there has also been the growing divorce between the political parties and their electorates. The preoccupation with a small number of voters in a few key marginals has resulted in New Labour echoing the whims and prejudices of a mythical Middle England. Class has been removed as an economic and political category in Westminster discourse. Labour’s traditional voters feel ignored, taken for granted and even abandoned. At the same time, the Tories have for decades ceased to offer a real opposition in many traditional Labour areas, leaving a dangerous vacuum.

In 1968 US sociologist Don Warren described the emergence of the ‘middle American radical’ to explain the rise of right-wing presidential candidate George Wallace. He saw a radicalised group of voters, drawn largely from the skilled working class, who opposed the political and economic elites while simultaneously despising those who they regarded as undeserving poor. A white identity emerged that had no political articulation.

A similar phenomenon is occurring in today’s Britain. The Labour Party too often fails to articulate the concerns of large swathes of its traditional working class supporters. Over the past 20 years turnout has slumped in Labour heartlands. Suddenly, as the BNP has emerged as a political force, many are now turning out to vote for them. Towns like Stoke-on-Trent reflect this change. Only a few years ago Labour held every seat on the council. Today, it holds just 16 out of 60, with the BNP close behind with nine. The local ethnic minority population is comparatively small, suggesting that voters are flocking to the BNP for some far more fundamental reasons.

Nor is there much comfort for parties to the left of Labour. It is easy to blame New Labour for the rise of the BNP but few have questioned why the far-left parties fail to attract significant support from white working-class voters. If anything, the far-left vote has actually shrunk since 1997 and the occasional successes of Respect or the Greens have been based on specific ethnic minority communities or middle-class liberals.

Race is a prism through which many voters view their world but it is not the underlying issue. That is why immigration minister Liam Byrne’s attempts to quicken the introduction of the Australian points system will ultimately fail to deal with the political problem. He might hope to appease voters’ concerns over immigration but unfortunately he, like many others, is misunderstanding the rise of the BNP.

Britain might have been slower to see the emergence of a major far-right party than elsewhere but this could change very quickly. Next year’s European elections, contested under proportional representation, will give the BNP its greatest chance to break into the mainstream.

The rise of the BNP is not a passing phenomena. We must now debate new strategies for organisation and policy, counter- organise on the ground and deal with the material issues that lie behind its popular support. Nothing is more important for this movement.

Footnote

Jon Cruddas is the Labour MP for Dagenham. Nick Lowles is editor of Searchlight magazine

New limbs for the left

Ellie Keen — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 17:14:10 +0000

New Labour is now reaping what it has itself sown: a cumulative weakening of the values of social solidarity, public service and altruism, which provide the invisible bedrock on which the electoral fortunes of the Labour Party ultimately depend.

From Peter Mandelson’s celebration of the ‘filthy rich’ and Tony Blair’s contempt for public sector workers, through to Gordon Brown’s present refusal properly to reward public servants and his insistence that ‘public service reform’ means contracting out these services to private business, self-seeking individualism has been valorised and public service ethics denigrated.

Brown’s overarching strategy has been to make Britain a fast-growing economy competing on the terms set by finance-led global capitalism and to stealthily engineer a trickle down to the deserving poor. As we know this has meant being soft on the super rich, while achieving a micro redistribution from the better off to low-income families.

This formula could more or less appear to work when the economy was buoyant. But as soon as this speculation-led growth began to falter New Labour’s uncritical attachment to the priorities of the City as the chosen instrument of economic expansion has become visibly paralysing.

As growth slows the government has less money to spend on tackling poverty or investing in services; and it dare not borrow more or tax the wealthy because to do so would torpedo its Thatcherite economic model. New Labour is consequently disarmed by the new Tory rhetoric of fairness, combined with a strong anti-statism, because it has neither a strategy for social justice nor a confident vision of the positive role of the state – and still less an overarching vision that brings them together.

And the two do go together. Seriously redistributive and green taxation is only politically possible if the state has real legitimacy – in other words, if there is a popular belief, grounded in experience, that the money paid in taxes is returned in responsive services that users feel are theirs.

The British state won this legitimacy throughout the post-war decades of reconstruction, building the welfare state and enjoying its first benefits. The result was a 20-year or so social democratic consensus legitimating taxation and redistribution. The delivery of these social benefits, however, was via an unreformed mandarin state, whose most powerful links with civil society were predominantly with business. These administrative hierarchies were imitated throughout the pubic sector. The result was a daily experiences of state institutions, from universities and the education system through to local government and even the health service, that was contradictory and frustrating – unresponsive to growing expectations and a new diversity of demand.

The social and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s were one response. Arguably one reason for the significance and lasting memory of Ken Livingstone’s GLC was that it was one the few politically successful experiments in translating the diffuse but creative radicalism of the 1970s into a popular political programme. It was cut short in its prime. We all know what happened then.

But perhaps now, after the May Day election debacle, the significance of what didn’t happen is coming home to roost for New Labour. The Labour Party didn’t grasp the importance of the GLC experiment, in all its messiness, in illustrating the possibility of transforming, opening up and democratising state institutions – and translating this onto the national level. This – and many similar experiences internationally – could have been the basis of a direct challenge to Thatcher’s privatisation and her reverse, Hood Robin, approach to redistribution. Indeed, Norman Tebbit saw the threat when he remarked of the GLC on the eve of its abolition: ‘This is modern socialism and we will kill it.’

The belief in values of social solidarity and in the possibility of bringing state institutions, international as well as national and local, under active democratic control – along with addressing the problem of corporate power – is still there and generating new kinds of political initiatives on the ground. How can they be strengthened and built on?

At times like this, when all the mainstream focus is on Westminster politics, the left (especially the English left) has to guard against attacks of ‘phantom limb syndrome’ – the pervasive assumption that the old labour movement levers of power connecting local activists with national politics are still effective or could become so. It’s a syndrome reflected in the endless debates about what to do about Gordon Brown, the calls on the party to do this or that, and so on. The truth is that New Labour (and the global economy) has all but destroyed these traditional levers, weak as they already were.

The left needs to attach new limbs by looking beyond its existing, inbred networks and engage in the variety of new (and often local) struggles and initiatives. These are organised through communities, geographical or otherwise, as well as (and more often than) workplaces. They relate to cultural symbols and identities more than narrowly political ones.

Many socialists are already working in this way to considerable local or issue-specific effect. There is a need to strengthen the exchange between them to give innovative content to the long-term political vision of a new kind of political force – and I consciously do not use the word ‘party’, for now.

Yes, we can

Ellie Keen — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

At a time when supposed “progress’ is controlled by transnational corporations, the struggle for human emancipation requires perseverance and transnational political organization to be able to control the corporations that seek to control us.

Progress is an idea invented in the 18th century, the age of the Enlightenment and of revolutions but it sometimes hard to keep the idea alive in our own time. In France, the revolutionaries overthrew the monarchy and the “natural order”—the ultimate heresy at the time. The Founding Fathers of the United States, imbued with the notion of progress, bequeathed it to generations of Americans. When it first flowered, the idea of progress was confined to the West, to what we might call the “Enlightenment Zones”; and to the relatively educated classes. Through following decades, thinkers and activists believed in human emancipation and fought for it—for the eradication of slavery, a new life for immigrants, the rights of workers, of women and minorities.

In those early days, science and technology seemed to be developing with such speed and assurance, solving so many problems and making life so much easier for millions that it was easy to believe—in 19th century Britain for example—that mankind was on the high road towards an ever-brighter horizon.

The notion of “development” embodied the 20th century version of progress. At least until the appearance of the UN’s Human Development Reports in the mid-1990s, the official “developers” like the World Bank confused economic growth with human well-being and, pushing vast programmes like the “Green Revolution”, counted on science and technology to eradicate poverty and inequality. China is still following a similar 19th century path, displaying unrivalled faith in technological progress while showing little interest in human liberation or ecological limits.

Two world wars, the Shoah, the gradually revealed horrors of colonialism, the nuclear arms race and civilian nuclear disasters all contributed in the 20th century to eroding faith in progress. Climate change, proliferating financial crises, the “oil shock”, the threat of massive famine and terrorism are playing the same role in the 21st.We seem finally to be getting it through our heads that civilisation can very well go backwards and that at this very moment we are almost certainly pushing it in that direction.

Historically speaking, only the left, only the progressive forces have ever brought about progress in the sense of human emancipation. So the question that TEMAS is asking its authors — “What would be a new idea of progress for the left in the 21st century?” is an urgent one.

Let me try to answer it first by pointing out the distinction one must make between scientific and technological advances and human progress. The two used to go hand in hand; today, however, the debate, indeed the fight concerns whether scientific developments actually constitute progress or not. Now the left must often try stop what the right labels “progress”, an inconceivable role for progressives a hundred years ago. In our day, when supposed “progress” is controlled by transnational corporations focused solely on profit and opening new markets, this is a progressive duty.

The example of Genetically Manipulated Organisms illustrates this point. Although no one has yet conclusively proved that GMOs are dangerous to human health, their harmful impact on the environment and their capacity to spread and destroy the freedom of farmers to grow organic or traditional crops is manifest. Knowing that transnational corporations control GMOs, particularly Monsanto with its heavy legacy of harmful products progressives are right to prevent the cultivation of GMOs except under strictly contained conditions.

We do not need more nuclear power but rather, as in Spain, much more investment in wind power and other alternative energies. Nor do we need new warplanes, however much these may earn for the military-industrial complex, but rather research and development of light-weight materials for building commercial aircraft in order to reduce drastically the amount of fuel they consume. As the philosopher Paul Virilio has pointed out, every technology comes with its own specific accident: the plane crash, the computer black-out with catastrophic information loss; the nuclear meltdown, various plagues due to unplanned release of manufactured organisms in nature, the oil spill or the chemical explosion—the list is long. The duty of progressives is to apply rigorously the precautionary principle and attempt to control the corporations that seek to control us. It requires perseverance and transnational political organisation to match the strategies of the corporations themselves.

The question of progress towards human emancipation is different. Here the left is obviously not called upon to prevent, but to seek and find new paths—just as all progressives who have ever lived have tried to do. All of them had to struggle against the myriad forms of oppression in the difficult circumstances of their own times, and most of them, let’s face it, lost. Spartacus did not bring about an end to slavery in ancient Rome, nor did slavery end until the 19th century. Hundreds of philosophers, proto-scientists, thinkers and innocent people were burnt at the stake before the power of the Church could be blocked. For centuries, Europe fought bloody wars resulting in untold numbers of needless deaths until a united Europe brought them to an end. Women were not recognised as fully human until less than a hundred years ago and are still trying to gain genuine equality, even in “advanced” societies. Human rights are still ignored in most places, including the west, so we do not lack for targets and 21st century “construction-sites”.

The unprecedented challenge facing progressives now is to be active on all geographical fronts. Until recently, it was quite enough to try to deal with the problems of one’s own country—decent wages, improved working conditions, proper health care, universal education, separation of Church and State and so on. Needless to say, national issues are still important. So are local ones. More and more, however, we can see that the boundaries of our lives reach well beyond our national frontiers. Europeans today must face the fact that 85 percent of the legislation governing them will come not from their national parliament but from Brussels and the EU is in the grip of the neo-liberal, business-driven economic model to the exclusion of any consideration of social progress.

The European Court of Justice has recently handed down no less than three decisions obliging Sweden, Finland and Germany to accept workforces from Eastern Europe paid up to 50 percent below the agreed wage for their own workers. These decisions are based on the “freedom to provide services”. They deliberately place European workers in direct competition with each other and organise the “race to the bottom” for wages and working conditions. In the Lisbon Treaty, the word “market” appears 63 times, “competition” 25 times, “social progress” gets three mentions and unemployment none. The Commission insists that there be no restrictions on the free movement of goods, services people and capital. How can we hope to tax international capital movements—as Attac has been proposing for years—if no “restrictions” are allowed and it is the unelected Commission or the Court that decides? Centuries of European progress can be rescinded and blotted out unless progressives can get this neo-liberal Europe under control; a task we must accomplish through trans-border organisation to match that of the European elites who are extremely well-served by present arrangements.

Internationally speaking, it is a painfully slow process to place vital subjects on the agenda, much less to get them acted upon. It took over twenty years to convince national and international decision-makers of the reality and the danger of climate change, so eager were they to listen to the corporations, especially the oil companies. Now that everyone is conscious of the threats, the leadership is once more paralysed. We know that climate refugees will be hammering on our doors in a matter of years—yet no preparations are made. We know that famine is once more stalking the world, that tens of millions of people who had emerged from lives of chronic hunger are being plunged once more into that particular hell, yet we continue to produce bio-fuels instead of food-crops and make no efforts to contain market forces that lead to mass starvation.

Progressives need to get rid of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation once-for-all and replace them with international organisations genuinely responsive to the needs of the neglected three-quarters of humanity. By the time he died in 1946, John Maynard Keynes had already drawn up blueprints for such organisations—we could do far worse than to exhume and improve them to suit today’s needs.

Everywhere we see elites anxious to end the democratic progress of past centuries and to put an unelected leadership [the EU Commission…] or technocrats [the IMF, the WTO...] faithful to their interests in charge. The constant struggle of progressives to preserve democracy pits them against their adversaries trying to undermine it: the democratic deficit must be the nexus of all our future action.

Perhaps because he recognises this, Barack Obama has emerged from near-political anonymity to occupy a pre-eminent place in the collective imagination and, one hopes, soon the office of the US President. In magnificent language, he gives people the sense of their traditions and achievements. Each time they were told they were not ready, that it wasn’t worth trying, that they could never win, they replied, “Yes we can”. The authors of the Declaration of Independence , the slaves and the abolitionists, the pioneers and the immigrants, the workers and the women, the New Dealers and the astronauts—all of them replied Yes we can.

Human history, and therefore the struggle for human emancipation, is not over and we must never insult the future. Let us hope that progressives worldwide, above all Europeans, will also unite around those words: Yes we can.

This article is a contribution to the debate on “The idea of progress in the 21st Century”, to be published in Spanish in TEMAS para el Debate, June 2008.

Susan George is Board Chair of the Transnational Institute and honorary president of Attac-France. Her latest books are La Pensée enchaînée: Comment les droites laïque et religieuse se sont emparées de l’Amérique [Fayard, 2007], to be published in English as: Hijacking America: How the Religious and Secular Right Changed What Americans Think [Forthcoming, Polity Press 2008], and We the peoples of Europe [Pluto Press, 2008].

Contours of New Labour Descent

JamieSW — Mon, 05 May 2008 11:58:39 +0000

When Tariq Ali says “New Labour is dead”, you don’t expect him to be matched in his prognosis by the soft-left Compass group. It is necessary to pause for a second and ask who the gravediggers will be. Arguably in this case the assassins are Labour voters who decided to abandon the party for either the Lib Dems, the nationalists, the Tories, the Nazis, the smaller left parties or – probably by far the biggest beneficiary – abstention. (If the turnout was higher in London, it was higher mainly in the dead zones of the Tory suburbs, which will spend the rest of the summer smelling of bigotry and barbecues until some kind of divine Ballardian punishment crashes the party.) It is certainly true, as Jon Cruddas argues, that working class voters are abandoning Labour in both the heartlands and the marginals, and the Tories are expecting to capitalise on that. This is hardly news, and even New Labour commentators like Jackie Ashley are saying as much.

However, for the electoral slaughter of New Labour to be consummated and full burial rites executed in the way that Compass envisions, there would have to be some force within the party that is capable of performing that service. And, as I will not tire of pointing out to those tempted to return to its deathly embrace, there is no such force. Some kid themselves that the stale wreckage of the Labour Left in London, which so assiduously coat-tailed Livingstonite liberalism, has the way forward for New Labour to avoid electoral obliteration in 2010. (Oh, Seumas Milne, you really ought to know better.) It is true that Ken Livingstone didn’t poll as poorly as New Labour in general. 36.38% of the mayoral vote went to Livingstone, but only 27.12% backed New Labour on the Assembly London-wide, and only 24% backed the party nationally. So a vague aura of leftism and independence helped Livingstone. But just over a third of the vote is still pretty poor, particularly when you’ve cut a deal with the Green Party, the Liberals and practically every non-Tory force that will work with you. New Labour is not dead, it is undead. And this is what the zombified party of government will do: it will segment its losses into the middle class, the ‘white working class’, and Muslims and ethnic minorities, and it will contrive a set of concessions for each group, based on a conservative agenda. To middle class voters it will offer to withdraw ‘green’ taxes or reduce them severely; to the ‘white working class’ it will offer a few miserly tax concessions, but try to deflect the main issues with racism by introducing a points system for immigration; to Muslims and other minorities, it will offer a combination of threats, cajolement and ‘integration’. That will not work, not least because the Tories can do this stuff much better. And when New Labour loses again, the best organised forces in the party will be the Blairites and they will take the opportunity to move further to the right and replace Brown with Miliband. Don’t look to a social movement to make any impact on this: if 2 million people marching in London couldn’t find its way onto the conference floor, the party is now almost completely impervious to mass social unrest.

The more aggressive wing of the Tory right is gleefully plotting all sorts of revenge – especially against the unions and against those Muslims who have had the run of the place under the communist tyrant ‘Red Ken’. Boris Johnson is pledging a ‘fightback’ against crime (so I’d keep an eye on Jeffrey Archer’s house), and hoping with his new confederates to force a no-strike deal on the RMT and Aslef, which is highly unlikely. The Tories may be more aggressive than Ken Livingstone’s administratrion, but they’d have to be prepared for an epic combat if they want to break the train unions. No sign of that yet. While Boris Johnson has appeared to accept in public that the PPP on the tube is a failure, his administration is likely to opt for the renegotiation of existing contracts and even sweeten the deal for Metronet rather than accept public ownership. He will keep the congestion charge, but probably protect Tory residents of the royal borough of Kensington and Chelsea from expansion, and also guard drivers of ‘gas-guzzlers’ against planned increases in their charges. His plans for increasing the number of police are actually not very extensive – 440 on first blush, and all of these ‘community support officers’ to move around on London’s massive public transport system. The effect will be negligible. He may have to limit his idea of metal detectors and knife archways on the Underground if he doesn’t want millions of pissed-off commuters baying for his blood. These things are not that popular in Heathrow Airport, and I can’t see people appreciating being stopped at fast-moving, crowded public transport hubs for having ordinary metal objects on their person. Seriously, has anyone actually thought this through? In all, I can see Boris Johnson running an unpleasant, aggressive and divisive administration, a test-bed for future Tory politics at the national level, but he will not be allowed to go too far lest he ruins things for his boss.

Both New Labour and the Tories are subject to two overarching global pressures that they don’t get to control. The first is that the capitalist system is entering its most chaotic phase since the 1930s, and may well experience a global collapse (one in four chance, remember?). Rising food and commodity prices has been coterminous with a real-terms contraction in spending power for many. If capitalism could deliver stable growth and rising living standards without accumulating enormous imbalances that lead to global crises, then New Labour would be alive and kicking. Moderate social democracy would probably be hegemonic. As it is, New Labour’s electoral calculus in the face of any crisis is always to move right, throw a sop to middle class voters in the marginals and expect working class acquiescence. That is why they decided to clobber working class taxpayers and give a tax cut to slightly higher income earners. At the same time, their economic rationale is that of neoliberalism: when profits are squeezed, you defend the country’s economic competitiveness by attacking the three main costs for any company – taxes, input costs and wages. This commitment to neoliberalism is tempered by the need to keep the unions on-side, but only marginally. This is why corporation taxes and taxes on profits are lower under New Labour, and why inequality has been allowed to soar, despite the minimum wage and some very modest redistributive measures. The Tories will respond in much the same way as New Labour, except that they don’t have to answer to unions and working class voters, and so can be much more aggressive. In fact, they positively benefit by throwing red meat to reactionaries of all stripes, provided they don’t go too far and alienate centrists.

The second overarching pressure is that the American empire, for which Britain is a big off-shore base, is hurtling toward defeat. It is losing its dollar dominance; it is losing ground economically; it can murder residents of Sadr City and Basra in the hundreds and thousands within days, but it can’t defeat Iraq without a draft, and it can’t attack Iran except through an Israeli proxy which would be hugely risky; Afghanistan is lost, and the commitment of a few thousand more troops won’t change matters. When mainstream American politicians talk about reducing dependence on foreign oil, they tacitly (and sometimes explicitly) appeal to the popular desire to get out of extensive imperial commitments that are costing trillions of dollars and contributing to a great deal of social distress. New Labour’s response to this is much like Old Labour’s. Cling onto nuclear weapons under the American umbrella, try to act as a bridge between America and Europe, back up US military subventions, and try to neutralise and contain antiwar movements. This logic has taken Gordon Brown toward flirtation with neoconservatism, and David Miliband will probably move even further in that direction. The Tories will not necessarily be more aggressive in that respect. Split between foreign policy ‘realists’ and neocons, they are also in the position of having to woo antiwar voters in Shropshire, formerly solid Tories who have experienced the civilising influence of mass street protests. Further, it is hard to see how the Tories could be more right-wing in their global orientations than new Labour. Blair backed Berlusconi, Brown backs Sarkozy, both have been comfortable with Bush – the European and American hard right are the natural allies of New Labour. Meanwhile, Cameron is probably not going to have any difficulty dealing with a Democratic presidency.

The countervailing movements against capitalism and empire that opened the 21st Century and made some waves in the UK electoral system are both experiencing set-backs and crises, partly because while they could mobilise people, there was no clear and commonly held vision about how to translate that success into real power. A whole tradition – call it the classical conception of socialism – has been lost here, and needs to be rediscovered. That conception identified both weaknesses in the system that could be systematically attacked and an agency with the power to challenge the system. For all the ingenuity and dynamism of these social movements, without that understanding, a lot of the steam has been lost amid fractures and mutual recrimination. Two temptations have resulted: one has been to relapse into social democracy (or some apparently more radical substitute, such as the Greens), whose crisis helped produce the movements in the first place; the other, less significant but as mistaken, has been to collapse into ultra-left purism and separation from the movement. We had better get this right, because an almost choreographed sequence of global crises is battering us, and if we can’t intervene effectively it will not be the centre that holds, it will be the far right that gains.

London Meltdown

JamieSW — Sat, 03 May 2008 10:34:44 +0000

What could go wrong did go wrong. Boris Johnson is mayor, with a convincing lead. The BNP got a seat on the Assembly. And the Left List failed to make an impact except in a few concentrated areas. The reasons for the latter are obvious enough: launching a new brand name in the space of a couple of months; set-back by a recent split in the organisation; squeezed by the Tory surge and the desire of many to ‘Stop Boris’ by backing Labour; squeezed by direct competition with those who still had the old name (who did poorly, but better than us overall, and much better in City and East); squeezed by a higher turnout. There were so many things militating against a strong Left List showing. But even I would not have expected last night’s atrophy. New Labour has collapsed decisively not on some right-wing hocus-pocus about crime or immigration (although the media hysteria obviously contributed to this), but on the ten pence tax rate and the economy and the sense that Labour doesn’t even try to represent ordinary working people any more. But the Left has not been in a position to make any inroads as a result. And, in part because of the poisonous climate generated over immigrants and Muslims, the Nazis of the BNP are on the Assembly while their estranged half-cousins from the National Front (who consider the BNP sell-outs) polled strongly in Bexley and Bromley as well as in Lewisham and Greenwich. There are some hard fights ahead.

The Blairites’ advice was evidently no use to Ken, who lost it in the last few days with a series of bizarre declarations, building up to his claim that he wanted to arrest people for littering. Even Boris Johnson didn’t go that far. The Blairite strategy is to move so far to the right on certain issues that even the Tories can’t criticise you, while giving the left some friendly words. More accurately, this is the Clintonite strategy of triangulation developed by the Republican PR man Dick Morris. Livingstone listened to this kind of advice at his own immense peril, but what else did he have to offer? He tried at the last minute to cut a vaguely ‘progressive’ looking deal with the Green Party, but I suspect that most Berry voters would have given him a second-preference anyway. And the Greens didn’t do all that well in the end, despite some locally strong votes. They kept two seats on the Assembly, but gained little from the extensive media exposure. Livingstone didn’t have anything new to offer Labour voters, wasn’t really keen to distance himself too much from the government, had no chance with most right-wing voters – his niche was exhausted and depleted. The Tories have been canny in selecting Boris because, despite his obvious unfitness for the role, his burlesque comedy obscures the memory of the ‘nasty party’. I suspect that ‘nice’ centre-right voters who might previously have lumped for the Lib Dems went back to the fold. It’s been hard to detect much in the way of policy from the Tories, and certainly little distinctive. Johnson did not win on an aggressive platform of clubbing the unions, hammering immigrants and brutalizing petty criminals. This isn’t Margaret Thatcher, the next generation. It is BoJo the Bozo, the clown from hell, all slapstick and bravado. His platform consisted of some relatively unthreatening centre-right soundbites, which is one reason why the (quite legitimate) attempts to make him sound scary didn’t work. One very small contributor to Johnson’s win is highlighted by John Harris in the Guardian today: “the topsy-turvy, faux-progressive politics minted by the self-styled pro-war left”. I don’t credit Nick Cohen, Martin Bright and company with very much influence at all, but they certainly contributed to the reactionary media campaign about ‘Islamism’, providing a ‘progressive’ proscenium for the racist dramaturgy.

What of Labour’s national wipe-out? First of all, we’ve just seen the complete enervation of the New Labour vision of a Whiggish coalition, a ‘progressive’ lib-lab bloc for centre-left hegemony in the 21st Century. New Labour collapsed, but the Liberals didn’t pick up very much of the slack. In Wales, as in Scotland, the nationalists are getting the benefit of the anti-New Labour vote. In England, the Liberals lost control of some councils and gained some, and they seem to have a net gain overall of just one council. It is surprising in this context to see the Lib Dem result being spoken of as if it’s a credible one for Nick Clegg. Commentators have been quick to draw comparisons with 1983, but the last time Labour’s share of the vote was this low was in 1968, shortly after Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech and at the height of Harold Wilson’s unpopularity over devaluation. Wilson’s government had also, despite some moderate reformist pledges, reneged on many commitments at the behest of the IMF. What is different this time round is the extent of Labour’s collapse in its heartlands. It didn’t just crumble in the marginals. It lost core votes across Wales, in Hartlepool, and in Wolverhampton. It lost a strong presence in Reading, by no means a marginal seat. It was kicked out of Bury in Greater Manchester after 22 years. The rapid erosion that began under Blair is now an avalanche. Blair’s 2005 election victory was more of a loss for the Tories than a thumbs-up for New Labour, with just over a third of voters backing the government and with less voters than supported Labour when it lost in 1992. It is now obvious that the Labour Party will crash to a poor second in 2010, while the Tories will pick up around 40% of the vote. The Lib Dems will not match their 22% vote in 2005.

Anyone who thinks that Labour is about to turn left is kidding themselves. Far more likely is that the government will take a more aggressive stance toward the unions (as it did in 1969, with ‘In Place of Strife’) and make a demonstrative crackdown on immigration (as it did with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1968). Labour doesn’t contain the resources for a regeneration of its battered left, any more than it did when John McDonnell failed to get enough PLP support to even run a campaign against Gordon Brown. The last vaguely leftish credible alternative to Brown was the late Robin Cook, whose standing after his dignified antiwar resignation speech would have made him the obvious candidate. And even he would have struggled. Just because the left-of-Labour vote was poor, just because the Tories have made a decisive recovery, don’t think that we can place our hopes in a New Labour conversion, or that we can avoid continuing to try to build a left-of-Labour alternative. We will be lying to ourselves in quite a dangerous way if we imagine that we can claw back some space by just abandoning the electoral terrain to New Labour. The fact that it is now a more difficult task in the short-term does not mean it can be wished away.

For socialists, however, elections are not our main kind of activity. Saying that, I run the risk of appearing to diminish the hard work put in and the hopes invested in the campaign, and that is not my meaning. However, while we should spare no blushes in being directly honest about what just happened, we should not allow ourselves to disappear up our own ballot-boxes. How we intervene in the coming crises over pay, the economy, and the rising threat of racism and the far right, is far more significant than how many votes we rack up. One of the first things we can do is turn out for the protest against the Nazi BNP outside City Hall, this coming Tuesday at 6pm.

There is an Alternative and it's Called Socialism

Ellie Keen — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:27:24 +0000

James Purnell, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, recently declared that Labour was now ideologically neutral. He and his ministerial colleagues like to portray themselves as pragmatists unburdened by outdated ideology.

According to Purnell: “Progressives want to make the world a better place. If people can do that using the private sector, the public sector or the voluntary, why not? We are ideologically neutral between all three; we want to use all three.”

But ideology is not about dogma. Ideas are not the abstract product of human imagination. The human mind is given its content by the contemporary material world in which it exists. Political ideology reflects the different interests in society and, in particular, class interests.

The dominant ideas of any society are those of the social class that operates as the ruling force in the economy and the production of wealth. That class is also the ruling intellectual force. We live in a capitalist society and so the dominant ideas are those of private enterprise and capitalism.

The present Government has embraced these ideas. In every aspect of policy, private is best. Innovation is seen the preserve of the private sector with modernisation a codeword for the greater involvement of the private companies in public services.

This Labour Government has privatised where even previous Conservative administration feared to tread: air traffic control and the London Underground. Privatisation of the National Health Service by stealth continues through foundation hospitals and the encouragement of independent sector treatment centres and polyclinics operated by multinational companies.

Purnell has announced plans to cut 12,000 jobs in his department while promising private contractors up to £75 billion to deliver employment services and other welfare benefits.
Business people are encouraged to take over schools through the introduction of academies where, astoundingly, they even have control of much of the curriculum.

No serious attempt has been made to reverse the restrictions imposed on the trade unions by Tories when they were in power. Throughout the current Government’s period of office, the unions have been held at arm’s length with even their financial contributions to Labour’s funds being at best grudgingly tolerated. By contrast, business leaders are enthusiastically courted for donations and advice, despite increasingly adverse publicity and allegations of corruption.

Inequality continues to grow. The top 10 per cent of the population now take at least 28 per cent of the national income – the same as before the Second World War. Yet John Hutton, the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, insists: “Rather than questioning whether huge salaries are morally justified, we should celebrate the fact that people can be enormously successful in this country.”

In the post-war period, there was a temporary retreat by capital faced with a powerful and organised labour movement. Unions were significantly strengthened in the economic upswing in the 1950s with membership peaking at more than 13 million in 1980. Labour governments were elected which, particularly in 1945-51, delivered real improvements in the lives of working people. The gulf between rich and poor was significantly narrowed in the period up to 1979. However, this was not to last.

The capitalist system remained fundamentally intact and, following the defeat of the Labour 1974-79 Government, there was a reassertion of its ideological dominance. Social democracy was deemed to have failed. The unions were blamed for many of the country’s ills. The ideological offensive of capital was immensely strengthened by the development of globalisation and the collapse of communism.

The left did not weather the storm well. The unions suffered a series of defeats. The steelworkers lost in 1980. ASLEF’s appeal to the TUC for assistance in 1982 in the dispute over flexible rostering fell on deaf ears. The miners’ strike of 1984-85 was lost and the print unions were crushed at Wapping a year later.

Labour was in crisis. In 1981, a section of the right wing of the party broke away to form the SDP, which ultimately collapsed into the Liberals amid bitter recriminations. However, this was not before the anti-Conservative vote had been split leading to huge majorities for Margaret Thatcher in 1983 and 1987.

“New realism” became the order of the day. Post-modern ideas signalled the abandonment of any alternative to the current economic system and a capitulation to laissez faire ideology. The Labour retreat began under Neil Kinnock who condemned the miners’ leaders and launched vicious attacks on the left.

The “new” Labour project was the culmination of this process, with Labour lurching ever further to the right and finally into the arms of George Bush and the neo-conservative Republicans with the disastrous Iraq war.

But private enterprise has not proved to be the panacea for society’s problems. For instance, trains operated by private companies refuse to run on time despite receiving double the subsidy provided to British Rail.

Private companies exist to make profit first and foremost. Where necessary, they will cut corners to do this – sometimes with dire consequences for service users. It was recently reported that 5,000 National Health Service operations had been cancelled because the private company responsible for cleaning surgical equipment was returning it dirty or damaged. It is no coincidence that the rise of superbugs in hospitals has accompanied the use of private companies to carry out cleaning.

However, ministers are so in thrall to the “free” market ideology that they are blind and deaf to the results of their policies. They simply cannot comprehend why Labour is losing support. All that is needed, they argue, is a little more time to get their message across. That’s what John Major’s ministers used to say and Gordon Brown’s are likely to be similarly disappointed. Northern Rock underlines the real weakness in modern Britain’s capitalist economy.

Globalisation has transformed capitalism into an increasingly monstrous system where a small number of companies and individuals own and control unparalleled wealth while much of the rest of the world’s population become increasingly impoverished. Regulation by national governments is increasingly difficult, with global corporations simply threatening to move their operations elsewhere. Inevitably, there will be a decline in living standards as one country is played off against another.

The question is whether there is any realistic alternative. The left must have a positive answer if it is to recapture the political agenda. Without this, many of those who suffer most under capitalism will look elsewhere. In Britain, sections of the white working class who feel increasingly alienated and unrepresented are flirting with the far right.

Internationally, increasing numbers have embraced Islamic fundamentalism.
Opposition to the worst iniquities of the capitalist system is not enough and nor are single-issue campaigns, although they can build into powerful movements. Stop the War mobilised two million people onto the streets of London against the invasion of Iraq. But the vast majority of those have not remained politically active. Inevitably, when an issue fades in importance, so does the movement it has ignited. Capitalism reasserts itself.

If the left is to provide a viable alternative vision, it needs a coherent ideology that expresses the interests of those not served by the current system – principally ordinary working people and their dependents who constitute the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. That ideology remains socialism.

Every effort has been made during the past 20 years to discredit socialism as outdated and irrelevant. No other ideology has been subject to such an onslaught. But socialism remains the only alternative ideology that can challenge capitalism effectively and offer humanity a future.

Nick Toms is a barrister specialising in employment and discrimination law and a member of Streatham CLP

Greens On Trial

Ellie Keen — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:48:42 +0000

There is a party, ostensibly of the left, that has more than 100 councillors (and rising), holds seats in the European Parliament and London Assembly, and might just drop an electoral bombshell by securing its first MP in the next general election. It’s called the Green Party. But for reasons either of jealousy or good socialist sense, it is regularly hauled up before the Court of Left Opinion, suspected of being overly electoralist, unduly white, middle class, and Not Sufficiently Left. It doesn’t even have factions that hate each other.

Confusingly for the presiding judges of the court, none of this seems to matter too much to the public jury, who are giving favourable verdicts to the Greens in growing numbers. Quietly, unassumingly, the Green Party of England and Wales has been making strides over the past few years, propelled by the ever-increasing urgency of the climate catastrophe.

Nevertheless, Red Pepper proposes a retrial – a trial by media, after a fashion.

A party of the left?

One of the main reasons why the left is suspicious as to whether the Greens _ can be counted among its number is that it contains many people who simply do not associate themselves with the British left and its glorious history of defeat.

One such man is Chris Rose, the party’s national election agent, who points out that ‘many Green Party members wouldn’t like to describe themselves as left. If we positioned ourselves as explicitly left it would be dangerous, with no guarantee of success. We need to keep our reputation on the environment.’

But London Assembly member Darren Johnson, who is not on the left of the party, takes a different view: ‘I’m not a socialist but I feel comfortable about being on the progressive left. Not the far left – we never will be. But we’re the serious party of the left and a potential power broker working with centre left parties, like the SNP in Scotland and Labour in some areas.’

One thing is beyond doubt. Whether or not they see themselves as left, the Greens have a manifesto as radical as any other, based on sustainability and equality, which if implemented would constitute nothing short of a revolution. Their espousal of an end to economic growth is unique, and has resulted in attacks from parties who believe in either capitalism or the traditional Marxist model of growth leading to a world of plenty. Instead, the Greens promote economic localisation, and say wealth should be measured not in GDP but in overall wellbeing.

And the party’s policies stretch far wider than the environment. They would (if they could) make income tax more progressive; replace VAT with eco-taxes; replace benefits with a non-means tested citizens’ income for everyone; increase the pension; nationalise the railways; welcome asylum seekers; stop the privatisation of council housing; reverse the privatisation of health and education; scrap PFI; scrap prescription charges; scrap tuition fees; scrap ID cards; scrap nuclear weapons and scrap wars.

Coalitions

So far so good. But other leftists squeal that when it comes down to electoral politics the Greens can be bloody uncooperative, as when they refused to make a pact with Respect before the last general election. Darren Johnson is defiant: ‘We often get criticised by left groups for standing against them, but they can’t even sustain coalitions with each other! It would have been a disaster if we had had a coalition with Respect – look where they are now.’

But hang on. The Greens do form alliances on councils – and have even been known to work with Tories. Most controversial was a coalition with the Conservatives and Lib Dems on Leeds City Council. The Greens eventually pulled out over plans for a new waste incinerator in 2006, after two years, but in many other places the Greens co-operate informally with other parties, including Tories.

Chris Rose doesn’t care: ‘We say none of the mainstream parties are worth anything. So, if the situation demands it, it doesn’t really matter which one we work with, just what the outcome is. We can’t sit on the sidelines forever.’ Others on the left of the party, like the party’s male principal speaker Derek Wall, are much less keen on such arrangements and are clearly embarrassed by the Leeds example, but in a decentralised party they have had to learn to live with it.

The potential for such unholy alliances goes further than just the council level. In December David Cameron announced that he wanted a ‘progressive alliance’ with the Lib Dems and the Greens to push for decentralisation. They rejected the offer as a publicity stunt, but it pointed to a new and unexpected problem for the Greens – they’re suddenly very popular with the other parties.

For Caroline Lucas, MEP for South-East England and the party’s female principal speaker, this is a double-edged sword: ‘If the mainstream parties really were going green we’d react with delight, but there are no signs that it’s anything more than words. In fact it’s dangerous that they are using the rhetoric without taking action – just look at Labour with coal-fired power stations.’

‘But on the other hand, look at how our vote has gone up since Cameron started talking green,’ she says. ‘I think people are savvy, they see through the empty words, but they are alerted to the issues and go looking for the real Greens.’

Darren Johnson believes the existence of the Green Party over the years has contributed to people taking the environment seriously, but that this is not enough. ‘We have put pressure on the other parties to green up their act,’ he says, ‘but we aren’t just a pressure group. In terms of making things happen you need Greens elected – not necessarily in government but in a position to really push the agenda.’

Concrete green advances

For Chris Rose, what matters is the outcome – the ‘need to make concrete green advances’. He points to Kirklees and London as examples.

Five per cent of all the solar energy generated in the UK is concentrated in Kirklees, the west Yorkshire borough that includes Huddersfield. The Greens hold four of the 69 seats on the council, which is under no overall control. This position has been sufficient to put some of their ideas into practice. Their latest success is a scheme for 30,000 homes to receive free cavity wall and loft insulation. The policy was voted through on a combined Green, Conservative and Lib Dem motion and means households will receive £400 of insulation measures free of charge. The project is funded jointly by the council and private company Scottish Power – something that might alarm many on the left, but which most Greens seem comfortable with.

In London, the Greens’ two Assembly members have found themselves in a pivotal position. Since Labour lost four seats in 2004, mayor Ken Livingstone has had to rely on the Greens to get his budgets through each year, giving Darren Johnson and Jenny Jones great bargaining power. They claim the credit for tripling the cycling budget from £21 million to £62 million and increasing the climate change budget for greener homes from just £100,000 to £12 million in four years.

Electoralist?

So the Defence can present the court with evidence of creditable achievement. But now the Prosecution brings a new charge: electoralism. Chris Rose still doesn’t care: ‘We need to ensure that in everything we do we make the maximum electoral advantage. I’ve been on plenty of demos but I’d rather put people in power who don’t need to be demonstrated against.’

Even some on the left of the party, like health spokesman Stuart Jeffery, would prefer more electoralism: ‘I do a shed-load at grass-roots level in Maidstone, like Keep Our NHS Public and community groups. We’re not wholly electoralist. We’re probably not electoralist enough. We should be more targeted and systematic.’

Perhaps one of the reasons why many Greens aren’t too bothered about being called electoralist is that they’re getting pretty good at it. In last year’s local elections the party increased its number of councillors by 20 per cent to 110. This year, in May, the party expects a further 10 per cent boost to that number, and is looking to increase its London Assembly representation from two seats to three.

But what the Greens are most excited about is the prospect of their first MP. Their sights are set on Norwich, where they are likely to be the second biggest party on the council after May; Oxford, where uber-activist Peter Tatchell will stand as a Green candidate in the next general election; and most importantly Brighton, where Caroline Lucas stands a real chance of winning.

In the Brighton Pavilion constituency at the last general election, Keith Taylor finished third for the Greens with 22 per cent of the vote, only marginally less than the second-placed Conservatives. Support in the city has been increasing ever since – 27 per cent in the European elections; 30 per cent in the locals; and 41 per cent in the last council by-election before Christmas. Added to that, the incumbent Labour MP is standing down.

‘In theory 26 per cent would win it,’ says Chris Rose, who really does care about this. ‘The big worry is that the Tories will come through. So we need to convince progressive people in Brighton to vote Green not Labour.’

Greens hope the Brighton electorate will be inspired by the significance of the choice before them. On Caroline Lucas’s election leaflets the appeal ‘Help us make history’ is emblazoned across a picture of the Houses of Parliament. ‘All the evidence suggests that once you get the first Green elected to a council or authority, you break the credibility barrier and more follow,’ Lucas comments. ‘Remember Labour’s first MP was elected in 1900, and by 1924 they were forming a government.’

First past the post

One of the reasons why the Greens have so far failed to break through that credibility barrier at the national level is the first-past-the-post voting system. In Germany, and more recently in Ireland and Scotland since devolution (where there is a separate Green Party), the Greens have fared well under proportional representation. Ironically, the experience of these successes suggests that the barriers erected by the electoral rules might be one reason why the English and Welsh Green Party tends to be more left than its European cousins, which have often been sucked into the prevailing system.

But ideological purity has limited appeal against success, so in Brighton the Greens are thinking tactics. The obvious response is to throw resources at the city. This will happen, but the Green version of targeting is less severe than that practised by, for example, Respect, which focuses relentlessly on a few core areas. At the last general election the Greens stood candidates in more than 200 constituencies.

Part of the reason is that the Green Party is more decentralised. Its 170 branches all sign up to national policy but retain a high degree of autonomy. But it is also a deliberate decision. Chris Rose explains: ‘In the British political system you’ll be laughed at if you only stand ten candidates. Unlike Respect we’re a proper national party.’

The first-past-the-post system is also forcing the Greens to tailor their political message. ‘The threshold is so much higher that we have to think about how we appeal to people who don’t see themselves as Greens,’ Caroline Lucas says. ‘We need to be far more creative in the way we communicate to win in a first-past-the-post election.’

But does this mean a compromise with electoralism, that the programme will be sanitised and weakened in the fashion perfected by New Labour? Lucas claims not: ‘Our roots are so strong in the social movements that there is no risk that our policies will be watered down. We offer integrity in our policy package, which is entirely decided at party conference. That’s what people buy into when they join the Greens. It’s just about how to communicate those policies.’

Leadership

This feeling that the Greens need to communicate better with the public and the media was the main factor behind an upheaval in autumn last year. In a referendum the party decided by 73 to 27 per cent to change its structure and adopt a leader, replacing the strictly non-hierarchical system of two principal speakers.

The debate echoed previous divisions between ‘fundis’ (fundamentalists) and ‘realos’ (realists), terms first coined in relation to splits in the German Green Party in the 1980s which have since been used to describe similar conflicts elsewhere. On the ‘fundi’ side was one principal speaker, Wall, and on the ‘realo’ side was the other, Lucas. ‘The leadership question was simply about how we get the message across,’ Lucas says. ‘Social change is still also about building on the ground outside parliament, but having a leader, a recognisable figure to articulate our views to the public, is not in any way incompatible with that.’

But others saw the move as substituting ‘the “eco” of serious ecological commitment with the dreary “ego” of conventional, shallow, careerist British politics,’ as Green Party London Assembly member Jenny Jones put it in the heat of the leadership battle.

In response Lucas insists that the Greens ‘should always be involved in non-violent direct action and consciousness-raising’. This, she says, is not in conflict with her own aspiration to be an MP. ‘Having a Green MP would scale up the impact of what the social movements and campaigns do outside parliament. It would be an incredible breakthrough. It would send shockwaves through the political establishment.’

Factions?

In any other left party such a fundamental question as whether to adopt a leader would have been marked by fierce faction fighting. But the Green Party is curiously lacking in this department. It has survived for more than 30 years without splitting up into five different sets of acronyms.

The closest thing to a faction in the Green Party today is a group called the Green Left. Conceived by, amongst others, Derek Wall, Peter Tatchell and Green mayoral candidate Sian Berry in 2006, the group’s job is to reach out to the wider left and link up with other socialists, with the added hope of bringing more left activists into the Green Party.

Through its email list the Green Left also loosely coordinates action in the party. It comprises hundreds of eco-socialist activists, but represents nowhere near a majority in a party of 7,500 members. Nevertheless, as Wall points out, he has been elected to the principal speaker position twice on a platform of ‘eco-socialism without apology’, suggesting that the group does have some organisational strength.

On a practical level Wall believes that Green Left has been ‘very successful in bringing through policies and bringing socialists into the party’. He believes passionately in forging links with committed activists of the Labour left, Respect (both versions), the Communist Party of Britain, the Socialist Party, and beyond to what he sees as the eco-socialist movements of Latin America, especially in Venezuela and Bolivia.

The unions are a particular focus. In February, Wall and Green MEPs Caroline Lucas and Jean Lambert addressed a trade union conference on climate change. The Green Party supports the TUC’s proposed trade union freedom bill, which would roll back Thatcher’s anti-union laws. And unions that are not affiliated to Labour, like the FBU and the RMT, have already funded Green Party activities. But Wall aspires to the example of Australia where Green-union links are far more developed, to the extent that construction unions have imposed ‘green bans’ and refused to work on certain developments on environmental grounds.

White, middle class academics

One obstacle to closer relations is the suspicion in the trade union and labour movements that the Greens are just a bunch of white, middle class academics. A cursory glance around the Green Party’s conference in Reading in February revealed that delegates were indeed overwhelmingly white and well-spoken; many of them boasted a Dr before their name; and an improbably high proportion of members seemed to have a perfect grasp of the most intricate details of green energy technologies.

But this is unfair. Something similar is true of most party conferences (with the exception of Respect), and the Greens had a higher proportion of women than is usually seen.

Away from conference, Greens insist they have been picking up support in ethnic minority and working class areas. The best example of this is Lewisham in south-east London where the Greens occupy six of 54 seats on the council. Darren Johnson, who has been a Lewisham councillor since 2002, as well as a London Assembly member, tells how he ‘started campaigning in Lewisham in the mid-1990s. By 1998 we got 30 per cent in my ward. That was the Guardian-reading middle classes, but it proved enough of a base to then widen our support. The big difference now is that we’re getting votes on the council estates, which make up about a quarter of the ward. You can’t get 50 per cent in Lewisham without significant support from ethnic minorities and the working class.’

Meanwhile, Stuart Jeffery thinks the class accusation is outrageous. ‘We’re not middle class idiots,’ he barks (as your intrepid questioner ducks for cover). ‘That’s quite offensive. I don’t mind being called an idiot but don’t call me middle class.’

The verdict

Back in the courthouse both sides have finished presenting their arguments. The judge bangs his gavel and addresses the court. ‘Members of the jury, it would be difficult for any leftist to read the Greens’ last election manifesto (Exhibit A) and not agree with the vast majority of it. At the heart of the party’s policies is a desire to stop all exploitation, not only of the planet but of the people too.

‘Yet the Greens will clearly never satisfy some on the left. They do have an electoral slant, they do encompass a range of political traditions and they do take a pragmatic attitude that, while refreshing, can lead to alliances with Tories.’

The jury retires. In the public gallery, Derek Wall looks nervous. Chris Rose still doesn’t care. In the visitors’ section, a fight breaks out between a member of Respect and someone from Respect Renewal.

The jury returns – it has failed to reach a verdict. The judge declares a retrial … by you, the readers.

Either Labour represents its core voters - or others will

JamieSW — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:12:18 +0000

You’d never know it from the way these things are discussed by politicians and the media, but most people in Britain – 53% at the last count – regard themselves as working class. And however hard it may be to agree on definitions of class, that majority is reflected across a range of statistical breakdowns of modern British society. Getting on for 40% of the workforce are still manual workers, for instance; add in clerical workers and you’re getting on for two thirds.

Yet despite the fact that class continues to dominate the country, it’s treated almost as a taboo by the political elite. Even when working-class life does make it into medialand, it’s typically in the form of contemptuous “chav” caricatures, as in the comedy show Little Britain. And when politicians do stray into class territory, they use euphemisms like “hardworking families” or proxies such as child poverty – the object of Alistair Darling’s best pitch to his own party in yesterday’s budget.

So the BBC’s decision to commission a series of programmes about the marginalisation of the working class in New Labour’s Britain should have been a rare opportunity to shine a light on the heart of modern life. Instead, under the banner of “The White Season”, the programmes have been focused entirely on the impact of immigration and race on the white working class, as if it were some sort of anthropological study of an endangered tribe.

The message was unmistakeably clear in the series trailer, where a shaven-headed man’s face is blacked up with writing by brown hands over the words: “Is white working-class Britain becoming invisible?” White working people were being written out of the script, we were given to understand, and multiculturalism and migration were to blame. But in reality, it is the working class as a whole, white and non-white, that has been weakened and marginalised in the past two decades. By identifying the problems of the country’s most disadvantaged communities as being about race rather than class, the BBC has reinforced stereotypes and played to the toxic agenda of the British National Party.

It’s also wrong. Of course, mass immigration in the past few years – overwhelmingly from eastern Europe – has had a disproportionate impact on working-class communities: in housing, public services and pay. The government has deliberately used the unregulated European Union influx as a sort of 21st-century incomes policy, and employers have ruthlessly exploited migrant labour to hold down wages. No one should be surprised if demoralised and powerless people reach for the nearest scapegoat – and it’s no coincidence that some of the worst racism is found in the most economically deprived areas.

But it wasn’t immigration that ripped the guts out of working-class Britain, white and non-white. It was the closure of whole industries, the rundown of manufacturing and council housing, the assault on trade unions, the huge transfer of resources to the wealthy, the deregulation of the labour market, and the unconstrained impact of neoliberal globalisation under both Tories and New Labour. Almost none of that has had a look-in so far in The White Season.

Hopes that Gordon Brown would take the government in a different direction look increasingly forlorn. Labour MPs who invested heavily in Brown are now concluding that Brownism is little more than Blairism without the glitz. Diehard Blairite ministers such as the new work and pensions secretary James Purnell, and business secretary John Hutton, have been given free rein to promote an aggressive pro-corporate and privatisation agenda. Hutton’s declaration this week that Labour should celebrate “huge salaries” and individualism was almost a parody of the early days of high Blairism. But Brown himself went out of his way on Monday to commit the government to accelerated privatisation in health, education and welfare.

Meanwhile, Darling’s budget confirmed his watering-down of the plan to tax the non-dom super-rich and his retreat on capital gains tax under corporate pressure, while Brown has resolutely resisted demands from trade unions and Labour MPs to give equal rights to agency and temporary workers as a way of relieving some of the worst abuse of migrant labour to undercut existing pay and conditions. The prime minister will only allow the issue to be considered by a commission with an employers’ veto. Corporate lobbying has also seen off the threat of a windfall tax on the grotesque profits of the energy companies – which could have given Darling some of the cash he would need to halve child poverty by 2010.

With a gathering economic crisis likely to deliver lower growth next year than Darling predicted and a continuing squeeze on public-sector pay, the political price of Labour’s failure to deliver for its core voters can only grow. The New Labour outriders used to argue that working-class voters could be taken for granted because they had nowhere else to go. Since the 2005 general election, that can no longer wash. Of the four million votes Labour lost, the largest number were from the working class, north and south, white and non-white. As Jon Cruddas, who ran a powerful challenge for Labour’s deputy leadership last year, points out: “Those voters didn’t go to the Tories, they went to the nationalists, the BNP, the Liberals and Respect – or they stayed at home”.

Blairites who insist Labour must once again concentrate on swing voters in southern marginals and “run up the flag” to pacify the rest are, he argues, 15 years out of date and threaten the social coalition needed to win – which can only be rebuilt by focusing far more on housing, insecurity at work, inequality in public services and public-led investment in deprived areas. This is the faultline that is now emerging in the parliamentary Labour party, with the revived centre-left around the pressure group Compass increasingly making the running and Brown tilting unmistakeably towards the Blairite right.

The next test of where this is leading will be the local elections in May, when the BNP, among others, is expected to make significant gains. Unless Labour is prepared to represent the interests of increasingly angry working-class voters, others will certainly fill the vacuum – and the ever narrower three-party stitch-up risks blowing up in the faces of the whole political class.

Some Reasons for Setting-up PPS-UK

Ellie Keen — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:12:41 +0000

“Another World is Possible”

(Slogan of the World Social Forum)

“Out of the same background came three major things: fascism, Bolshevism, and corporate tyranny.”

(Noam Chomsky “Class Warfare”)

Introduction

The Project for a Participatory Society – United Kingdom was started in early 2006. It was set-up to help bring together social justice activists who are interested in developing and organising around participatory knowledge, vision and strategy. It is open to anyone who wants to work towards creating meaningful democratic social systems in the political, economic, kinship and community spheres.

PPS-UK is made up of 3 main components –

* “Our Basic Organising Framework” – This document is set out to answer any basic questions that people may want to ask about PPS-UK and to serve as an elementary guide for participants. It lay’s out and clarifies organisational features. These features determine the fundamental character of the organisation.
* Activist Networks – This facility allows people to make contact with others who are interested in developing projects and ideas relating to participatory society.
* Projects – Activities are initiated and run by PPS-UK activists. There is no leadership spoon-feeding activists campaign ideas or delegating tasks. All projects respect and operate within “Our Basic Organising Framework”.

The Challenge

The fundamental challenge facing the Left today is revitalisation. Our assessment of and conclusions to what actually caused the demise of the left in the first place will shape our approaches to this challenge.

For example, if we conclude that the demise of the Left can be explained satisfactorily by factors external to our ideology (for example Rightwing propaganda and/or state violence) then we simply have to organise in the usual way to try to build popular resistance. This conclusion requires no serious reassessment of Leftwing theory and practice.

However if we conclude that in addition to these external factors there are also important internal factors that have to be taken into account then this means that we need to change the way in which we organise. It means that, if we are to be successful in revitalising the left then we need a radical rethink of our vision and strategy.

Unfortunately much of the traditional Left seems to have drawn the first conclusion. There seems to be very little interest within Leftwing circles for an honest examination of our history in the hope that something better may develop out of the process. Instead of any genuine radical-progressive spirit guiding the Left the usual dogmatic assertions are put forward. The outcome of this is a continuation and reinforcement of factions within the Left- all ironically taking place under the banner of “solidarity”.

To continue down this road guarantees only one thing – that the popular movement we all desire, want to help build and be part of will remain nothing more than a fantasy.

Fortunately however, a small (but growing) group of genuine radical thinkers have risen to the challenge of reassessment and have made very impressive progress. This reassessment usually goes under the general heading of “participatory visions and strategy” and it was this work that inspired the setting up of PPS-UK. What follows is a brief explanation of the thinking behind this process.

The Need for Popular Knowledge

In fairness to the Old Left we have to acknowledge that they are very good at at-least one thing. That one thing is telling everyone (or more realistically anyone who will listen) how terrible and unjust the world we live in is. The Old Left gets 10 out of 10 for this!

I say this both sincerely and sarcastically –

Sarcastically, because the Old Left perpetually use the approach of “telling people how bad things are” as a method of consciousness-raising and recruitment despite its rather limited success.

Sincerely, because I think making this knowledge popular is a very important part of the work we need to be doing.

The problem really is this. It is true that the world is a terrible and very unjust place and we can’t just ignore this because it is too painful or depressing to face up to. But if this is all we have to say – or if this is the main thing we have to say – then people are not going to be attracted to our organisations.

So in addition to building peoples knowledge about how society really works we also need to balance this with positive aspects within our campaigns.

The Need for Compelling Vision

One positive aspect we could embrace is that of vision – and yet this is almost universally ignored or rejected out of hand by the established Left. But it’s hard to understand why this makes any sense. Ok, there are dangers that go along with developing vision – for example it could become too prescriptive and stale – but whilst this is a good reason to be careful when working on vision it certainly is not a good reason to stop working on vision all together. And anyway the positives of developing good vision far out-weigh these concerns.

As already mentioned one such positive is that we need vision of what our alternative society could look like “tomorrow” to balance out the negative views about society “today”.

We also need to know (at least in some detail) what our long-term goals are because this helps to inform and guide our short-term objectives. So when we get involved in reform campaigns we can formulate these in such a way as to fit them into our overall campaign for social transformation. The basic argument is that without long-term vision it is very hard to know if we are even on the right path at any given moment.

But perhaps most of all we need compelling vision to convince people that what they are working for is worth the effort.

The Need for Realistic Strategy

But this is not the end of it! We also need a way of getting us from where we are today, to our preferred future society. Again this is not something that the traditional Left were very good at. In fact the strategies employed by the Left (and still advocated by dogmatic Old Left organisations today) can be generally described as dysfunctional. I say this simply because they say they want to go towards a certain goal (say classlessness) and yet they tend to go in a different direction (towards a new form of class society or reproducing the old class hierarchies).

Now a lot of the Old Left tries to tell us that this happened because of circumstances that were outside of their control – like civil war or pressure from foreign countries – and of course these circumstances did not help. However this is only half of the story.

If we think of classlessness again, most Left organisations (whether revolutionary or reformist), organised hierarchically and with a division of labour as part of their strategy. Naturally enough this resulted in the people at the top/centre of the organisation monopolising the empowering tasks whilst the people at the bottom/periphery are left to do all of the disempowering tasks. Not surprisingly this kind of organising strategy resulted in the creation of new forms of class dominance and not classlessness. The important point here is that this occurred because of internal factors – hierarchical organising, division of labour – and that even under the most idyllic circumstances this was always going to be the case using this organising strategy.

Conclusion

PPS-UK organises around 3 core concepts –

A) Knowledge – developing a good understanding of how social systems work today.

B) Vision – developing compelling vision of alternative social systems.

C) Strategy – developing realistic strategy to get us from A (society today) to B (our alternative society).

It is felt that this approach and the ideas contained in participatory vision and strategy offer much more hope for radical-progressive social transformation than those found in traditional Left ideology.

It is also felt that established Left ideologies have very little to say of any worth with regards to vision and strategy and that what they do have to say can only be learned from in the negative sense. In the end it was the combined thoughts and feeling of a deep dissatisfaction with established Left-wing theory and practice in parallel with the inspiration produced by participatory vision and strategy that lead to the desire to set-up the Project for a Participatory Society here in the United Kingdom.