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After New Labour

eddie — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:54:44 +0000

The credit crunch is a salutory reminder of two things: the weakness of governments and the power of governments. Governments failed to predict, prevent or prepare for this crisis; but they have also shown that they can, after all, make massive interventions in the globalised economy when they want to. Will this lead to great democratic and social reforms as the depression of the 1930s did? At the moment, it seems unlikely.

The key difference between today’s situation and the aftermath of the 1929 crash is the absence of countervailing forces to finance capital. Contrast this with the middle decades of the last century, when the threat of communism, the power of organised labour, and the strength and autonomy of municipal governments all posed serious challenges to the power of banks and corporations, making it possible for governments to implement the very high levels of regulation and socialisation typical of welfare capitalism. Today, globalisation and the difficulty of effective labour organisation leave governments of the left in a much-weakened position.

Despite this, the great Fabian fantasy – the dream of benign and omniscient government re-ordering social relationships from the centre of administrative power – maintains a grip on the imagination of both left and centre-left which is crippling in its consequences. On the one hand, New Labour tries and fails to solve social problems from the centre. On the other hand, its radical critics have consistently and correctly pointed to New Labour’s enthusiastic embrace of most of the neoliberal programme, but they also rarely address the broader question of the global political context and the constraints that it imposes. For example: can anyone really doubt that if New Labour had attempted to resist the international imperative towards privatisation of public services, as many wish they had, then the press and the City would have turned on them savagely, turfing them out of office after a single term?

The point is this: if we want a democratic future, then “what policies should government enact?” is almost always the wrong question to ask. The question for anyone interested in a progressive route out of the crisis is: “what alternative sources of power should government be trying to build up, to fill the vacuum left by the financial institutions which have ruled the world for the past 30 years?”

The right has often understood better how to think this way. The most brilliant strategic move by any government in living memory was Thatcher’s sell-off of council houses. The effect was to turn a generation of former Labour voters into small-time property speculators, creating a massive source of pressure on future governments to continue acting in a Thatcherite way. So even while real wages were shrinking, debt was spiralling and working-hours climbed ever-upwards, governments have been forced to pursue policy objectives (easy credit, high asset prices) which in the long-term only benefit the real capitalists.

New Labour has never had an equivalent strategy. It could have helped the unions to reinvent and renew themselves for the 21st century, instead of pushing hard to remove protections from workers across Europe: by now a revived labour movement would be a powerful ally in the face of recession and Tory revival. It could have thought strategically about how to encourage the development of a democratic media sector in the world of web 2.0: instead it has never ceased to cower before Murdoch.

Instead of allowing the PFI industry to erode the democratic accountability of public-service provision, it could have helped to rebuild local government as an ally in the effort to regulate capitalism. After New Labour, this is the path which any potential progressive government worth the name will have to follow.

“After New Labour”, the second debate in the “Who owns the progressive future?” series, organised by Comment is free & Soundings journal, will take place in London at Kings Place on November 3 at 7pm. Guardian readers can obtain tickets at a special rate of £5.75 by phoning Kings Place box office on 0844 264 0321 and quoting “Guardian reader offer”. For full details click here.

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.

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.

Education for Economic Justice

Ellie Keen — Sat, 24 May 2008 11:57:50 +0000

Introduction

Education is the starting point for all progressive movements. All activism has to be guided by ideas and all organising has to be built upon a foundation of popular knowledge and shared understanding. This said, what should be the educational priorities for the trade union movement struggling to revitalise itself?

I will attempt to answer this question from the perspective of a UK based trade union activist with broader concerns for social justice on an international scale. To begin with I will try to illustrate the nature and extent of the current trade union crisis by drawing on several well informed sources. Drawing further on these sources I will argue that our current situation is the result of a crisis of identity brought on by a loss of vision and perspective. We will then briefly look at some signs of dissatisfaction within the trade union movement. Using this understanding of the current crisis, and hopefully building on this dissatisfaction, I propose the need for education for revitalisation – an education program run by and for trade union activists in which we collectively learn to conceptualise economic justice as a means of recovering a common identity based on an alternative vision of society and thus overcoming our crisis.

The Nature and Extent of the Current Trade Union Crisis

“There is no question today that the labor movement is in crisis” said Dan Gallin at a Global Unions, Global Justice Conference in 2006¹. He then went on to describe the nature and extent of the current crisis as follows:

What we are facing is: ...

serious loss of membership in most countries of the world, especially in the unions’ industrial heartland in Western Europe and North America;

an inability to organise the huge and growing mass of unorganised workers, not least in the informal economy;

the lack of political and industrial power to resist and defeat repression, either in the form of a systematic campaign of murders, as in Colombia, or of State policy, as in China and many other authoritarian States, or of anti-labor legislation backed by a hostile government, as in the United States or in Australia;

lack of capacity to resist the dismantling of social protection, of social services and of public property, an agenda carried out by conservative and social-democratic governments alike (as in most of Europe, North America, Australia and Japan, and, under pressure from the IMF, in Africa, Asia and Latin America).

More specific examples of the crisis are found in an article by George Monbiot discussing the relationship between the (UK) Labour party and the affiliated trade unions². Monbiot writes that Gordon Brown’s government “has room for no professional trade unionists.” However, he continues referring to Digby Jones (previous head of the Confederation of British Industry and current minister for trade and investment) “it does contain their sworn enemy.” It was Digby Jones – who Monbiot informs us “refuses to join the Labour party” but has “been permitted to enter the government on his own terms” – who “campaigned to freeze the minimum wage, neuter the EU’s working time directive, block corporate killing laws, promote privatisation, cripple environmental rules, and curtail maternity leave.” He has also said of trade unions that they are an “irrelevance”, “backward looking” and “not on today’s agenda”.

Despite this disgraceful situation Monbiot points out that “some important victories have been won since 1997”. For example we now have “a minimum wage, better pension protection, improvements in parental leave, and better conditions for part-time workers.” But he also points out that “the list of defeats is much longer”:

There is the private finance initiative, doggedly promoted by Gordon Brown, which now dominates the provision of most public services. There is the creeping marketisation of health and education … And the government has refused to repeal Thatcher’s draconian union laws … we still don’t have a corporate killing act. Inequality has reached scarcely imaginable levels, tax evasion is rampant, the railways are still in private hands, council housing remains moribund, companies don’t have to publish operating and financial reviews, and the minimum wage is far from being a living wage. And there is still the small matter of an illegal war in which perhaps a million people have died.

Incredibly, Monbiot reports, “The cash-for-honours scandal has frightened off almost all the major private donors, leaving the party largely dependent on union funds.” So, Monbiot asks, “what do they intend to do with all this power?”, He concludes “To judge by their recent statements, nothing”. “Desperate to believe, union leaders cling to broken promises. They refuse to utter the only threat that Brown will heed: disaffiliation”.
In an attempt to try and gauge trade union desperation Monbiot phoned the TGWU and asked a spokesman “what might prompt disaffiliation”? “Nothing,” he told me.” Monbiot pushed the point asking – “So if Labour adopted the swastika as its logo and started holding torch-lit rallies in Parliament Square, it could still count on the TGWU’s support? “That’s an extreme example,” he replied. But he did not deny it.”

The Root Causes of the Current Trade Union Crisis

Returning to the “Global Unions,Global Justice Conference” speech Gallin then asked “Why has this happened?” He states that this “crisis is generally attributed to the economic, social and, ultimately, political effects of globalisation, unfolding in the 1980’s and 1990’s”. However, for Gallin these are “true insights, but they are partial truths and partial insights”. For Gallin the “crisis of the trade union movement today is in fact the outcome of a larger crisis of the broader labor movement, which began much earlier, much before the onset of globalisation.” According to Gallin –

To understand what has happened, we need to do a flash back, about seventy years ago or more… Fascism in Europe, whatever else it may have been, was a gigantic union busting exercise. Its consequences, and the consequences of WW2 , are too often forgotten. A whole generation of labour activists, the best people, disappeared in concentration camps, in the war, or did not come back from exile…

At the end of the war … the labor movement re-emerged, superficially strong, because it was part of the Allied cause, and had won the war, whereas capital was on the defensive, having largely collaborated with fascism in the Axis countries and in occupied Europe.

However, Gallin adds –

In reality, the labour movement had been greatly weakened, with a decimated leadership and its capacity to act as an independent social force severely undermined. All democratic governments in post-war Europe were initially supportive of the labour agenda and consequently the trade unions, in their weakened condition, developed an over-reliance on the State. No longer was there any aspiration to represent an alternative society. Amidst the new found peace and prosperity, the labour movement had disarmed ideologically and politically.

As a result of these historic events Gallin argues that the “real crisis of the labour movement is a crisis of identity and perspective”. Continuing this theme Gallin adds that “a serious challenge to the domination of global transnational capital cannot be mounted unless the labor movement recovers a common identity based on an alternative vision of society: the vision of freedom, justice and equality that inspired it at its origins and made it the greatest mass movement in history.” Gallin states that “We do have an international trade union movement, such as it is. It has no vision, and it does not inspire anyone.” Adding that “What we have here is an ideology of global “social partnership.”“ and for Gallin “the ideology of “social partnership”, which became dominant in the labour movement in the three decades following WW2, has now become the main obstacle to the necessary renewal of the movement.”

In a similar vein to Monbiot’s earlier comment regarding “union leaders cling to broken promises” Gallin observes –

Large parts of the trade union movement are still unable to come to terms with the loss of their presumed “social partners”, even while transnational capital has obviously abandoned any “partnership” perspective and is using its vastly increased power to unilaterally impose its interests on society.

Some Signs of Dissatisfaction

There are however those who seem willing to face up to the reality of the situation. In his article Monbiot also quotes Bob Crow, the leader of the Rail Maritime and Transport Union (RMT), who recently told the other unions that “any hope of the Labour party working for workers is dead, finished, over. I think all you who are staying in the Labour party are just giving credibility to it.” In 2006 the RMT sponsored a conference at which over 300 trade union activists called for “the establishment of a National Shop Stewards’ Network”. At the conference Bob Crow stated that “If we are to roll back the tide of privatisation and war, rebuilding the grassroots of our movement is essential.” The conference collectively declared that “ ... enough is enough; we can and must turn the tide. It is time we got together to organise the fight-back against the whole range of attacks and the laws that aid and abet them.”[3]

Similarly Elaine Bernard of the Harvard Trade Union Program has argued that revitalisation of the trade union movement requires a return to what she refers to as their “social movement heritage”[4]. What Bernard is referring to here is Labour movement campaigns that resulted in the National Labour Relations act (US) of 1935, the purpose of which was “ ... not simply to provide a procedural mechanism to end industrial strife in the workplace [as with social partnership]. Rather, this monumental piece of New Deal legislation had a far more ambitious mission: to promote industrial democracy.”

Bernard points out that “ ... workers are schooled every day at work to believe that democracy stops at the factory or office door. But democracy is not an extracurricular activity that can be regulated to evenings and weekends.” She argues that “labor today needs to tap this source of wider appeal for unions by placing the extension of democracy into the workplace front and center.”

This is not to say that trade unions should abandon the bread and butter issues of the day to day support of its members. Bernard rightly points out that “there has always been a tension within unions between servicing members and fulfilling the wider social mission of labor to serve the needs of all working people, whether they are organised or not.” But for Bernard “it is becoming increasingly clear in today’s political environment that unions need to do both” –

Unions, like any organisation, will not survive if they do not serve the needs of their members. But unions will not survive and grow, if they only serve the needs of their members.

Education for Revitalisation

However, as radical-progressive economist Robin Hahnel has commented⁵ –

As important as it is for union members and elected officials to move their unions beyond bread and butter , or “business” unionism, Bernard’s proposals would only return the [ ... ] labour movement to its pre-Cold War agenda.

This observation is also true (but in different ways) of the National Shop Stewards Network which as it stands would only return the UK trade union movement back to its pre-Thatcher position. Although Bernard’s proposals are welcomed as a “necessary first step”, for Hahnel “If [ ... ] unions are going to promote the economics of equitable co-operation more successfully in the twenty-first century than they did in the twentieth, they are going to have to change in other ways as well.” Drawing attention to a central weakness in the trade union movement Hahnel states that –

... few union leaders today could tell you if they thought the workers they represent are exploited because they are not paid their marginal revenue product, or exploited precisely because they are paid their marginal revenue product … As passionate as union leaders are about economic justice, they have a remarkably difficult time saying clearly what it is.”[6]

“No wonder” Hahnel concludes “the most powerful progressive movement of the twentieth century, the union movement, became confused and hypocritical on the subject most central to its own mission.” Picking up on Gallin’s earlier point regarding a lack of alternative vision within the labour movement, Hahnel points out that –

Unfortunately most unions have fallen into the ideological trap of justifying wage demands on the basis of the market value of their member’s contribution, their marginal-revenue product”[7]

Again echoing Gallin’s earlier point Hahnel argues that “Unions must return to their mission of being the hammer for economic justice in capitalism” adding that –

There is no good reason unions can’t do a better job of educating their members about economic justice.

According to Hahnel “Unions don’t have to wait on new organising successes to teach present members what economic justice is and is not. This is not ground that should be difficult to conquer.” He continues -“The first step is to clear our own heads of cobwebs and relearn how to preach to the choir.”

Learning to Conceptualise Economic Justice

Of course trade union education should never be dogmatic. Rather, its primary function should be to encourage a rich and lively intellectual working class culture. The only guiding principles for a course on economic justice would probably be that it takes as its starting point the values of solidarity, democracy, freedom, equality and justice that historically have underpinned the labour movement. From there we can clarify these values and use them as a kind of criteria for assessing and evaluating how good or bad any economic system is by our standards. We can also explore means of organising our economy so that these values become real. In other words, we collectively design institutional features for an economy that would actually deliver traditional labour values.

Such courses already exist both online and in book form. For example Michael Albert’s “Thinking Forward” which is a book based on an online course on economic vision⁸. Part one of this interactive book sets the scene by asking “What is an Economy?” Participants are encouraged to identify the basic functions – Production, Allocation and Consumption – of any economy.

Following from this basic introductory understanding there are sections exploring different values for production, allocation and consumption. This is followed by a further exploration of possible institutional features for production, allocation and consumption. Naturally enough, from this exploration a number of questions emerge that are central to economic justice. For example –

Ownership – who should own economic institutions?

Internal structure – how should the workplace / economy be organised?

Decision-making – how and by who should decisions be made?

Remuneration – what criteria should we use to work out how much people get paid?

Planning – by what overall means should we manage the production and consumption of goods and services?

Impact – we may also want to consider the effect that any given economic system has on other social spheres – such as the political, kinship, community spheres – as well as the natural environment.

There are also sections on “Existing Visionary Options” and “Evaluating Economic Vision”. In these section we identify already existing economic models – for example variants of capitalist economics, socialist economics, community economics and participatory economics. We then clarify the institutional features of these economic models and consider means of evaluating them. Perhaps most importantly this process equips participants with the intellectual tools to go beyond evaluating existing models and empowers them to consider alternatives and potentially invent entirely novel economic systems.

Conclusion

The result of this process is that trade union activists would be able to think for themselves in a non-dogmatic fashion about economic justice. They would be able to participate in a lively debate about an issue that is of central importance and interest to all labour movement activists. Of course, when thinking about economic justice not everyone will agree on every detail. But with clarity and consistency of thought we can expect that some broad agreement on the basic institutional features that go to constitute a model of economic justice can be achieved.
The generation of such an intellectual culture within the trade union movement is what is necessary if we are to address the crisis we find ourselves in today. By teaching such courses we address the root cause of the crisis – which, as we have seen, is a crisis of identity brought on by a loss of vision and perspective. Furthermore such courses are the only means by which we can genuinely recover a common identity based on an alternative vision of society. Education for economic justice is therefore a crucial first step towards trade union revitalisation.

Notes:

[1] Organising: Means and Ends – Dan Gallin
http://www.globallabour.inf/en/2007/09/organizing_means_and_ends_by_d.ht…
[2] They still rage about the class war, but keep funding their class enemies – George Monbiot
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/07/10/union-with-the-devil/
[3] For an introduction to the NSSN see “Rebuilding the shop stewards movement” at – http://www.shopstewards.net/pamphlet.html
[4] Why Unions Matter – Elaine Bernard’s
www.htup.harvard.edu/ed/whyunions.pdf
[5] Economic Justice and Democracy – from competition to co-operation – Robin Hahnel
[6] The ABC’s of Political Economy – a modern approach – Robin Hahnel
[7] Economic Justice and Democracy – from competition to co-operation – Robin Hahnel
[8] Thinking Forward – Learning to conceptualise economic vision – Michael Albert
http://zcommunications.org/zparecon/tfintr.htm
Developing Economic Vision Instructional
http://zcommunications.org/zmi/zinstruc6.htm

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.

Parties, Movements and Radical Change

Ellie Keen — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:28:24 +0000

I am constantly struck by the failure of the radical left to explicitly seize the moral high ground. The right (especially the evangelical right) are not averse to doing so when it suits them, yet socialism, internationalism, ecological sustainability, feminism, anti-imperialism all have very strong ethical foundations. Appealing broadly on key issues to a very basic humanity and compassion potentially connects us to audiences that for some years have been removed from radical left politics- the many people in various religious and moral camps.

This may cause some on the left to question long-held beliefs, such as on the use of violence, but that’s no bad thing. The enormous success of the London Citizens movement in bringing together trade unions and religious groups should be a lesson to us all. We tend to focus too much on detail and not enough on the big ethical issues underlying our politics. For example, half the world’s GDP is routed through tax havens which means half the potential tax revenues are lost. This is so grotesquely unfair to people who pay their taxes that it allows us to explain to them that there is enough money in the world- it’s just who’s got it and the tax systems set up to protect them that’s the problem.

Identify the issues

We need to identify the issues where there is real possibility of a broad anti-capitalist, anti-establishment consensus emerging in the UK (and internationally) and focus on these.

It is possible to change mass consciousness on certain issues in a relatively short space of time. They key then is to turn this into a permanent (or near to permanent as possible) step forward, ideally framed in law as well as in the popular consciousness. It’s been noted in other contexts how social attitudes to drinking and driving changed dramatically in a generation to one of outright hostility to such selfish and dangerous behaviour. The same is now happening on global warming and living within environmentally sustainable limits. Radical left activists must build the broadest possible unity around such issues and be at the heart of arguing for such transformations, using them to explain the links to other social, economic and political issues.

Respond rapidly and create permanent resources

Insufficient time and effort goes into translating successes into permanent acquisitions, not just ideologically but also physically and virtually. To be able to respond rapidly and effectively, the radical left needs embedded resources and infrastructure. This will take many forms such as resource centres, websites, socio-political networks and funding sources. Rather than forming another party or newspaper a shrewder investment may be to create and sustain permanent resources for the range of needs the radical left needs for its activities.

Remove the barriers

There are some structural issues that are critical barriers to progress for radical left politics. The most obvious is the electoral system. Proportional representation is no panacea but crucial if radical left politics is to enter the mainstream electoral and political arena. Another barrier is the party system and elections. The party system, especially in local elections, is a major barrier to making radical breakthroughs at a local level. The radical left needs to develop proposals and campaign to make it much easier for independent candidates and small parties to stand in local, national and European elections.

Recognise opportunities

As Hilary Wainwright hints in her article it is also crucial to seize any opportunities to create and sustain forms of local democratic debate and accountability as ongoing spaces. For example, for its own reasons this government has decided to promote participatory budgeting but is it just a panacea? No, current developments in Porto Alegre show this.

To incorporate local processes of structured debate and discussion about what needs to be done and how money should be spent locally would represent a huge step forward for the UK. Potentially it could raise debate about the need for structured discussion of the national budget and priorities, weaken the power of the traditional local parties to have exclusive access to this discussion and help reawaken interest in politics.

The crucial thing is for the radical left to recognise such opportunities when they arise and to seize them rather than sneer from the sidelines at the government’s motives.

This article is one of a number, in what Red Pepper describes as ‘not so much a debate as a collaborative inquiry’ on Rethinking Political Parties. Join the debate here.