I’ve joined the Labour Party.
I gave some of my reasons for leaving the Socialist Workers
Party in another post.
Since then I have left another outfit – I’m really going
through them now! Perhaps I will also be expelled from the Labour Party for not
believing in its values. I hope not – I’m hoping that logic will dictate that
the values of Labour changed when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader and that I
will now be considered fit to be a member.
So, why did I leave that other outfit, and have I learned
any lessons?
When I left SW, it was really with a feeling of sadness.
When I left RS21 it was one of relief mixed with anger.
Ill try to explain.
Having been in two revolutionary socialist organisations has
enabled me to see both more clearly - what they have in common, and also what makes
them different. The relationship between two positions becomes clear when there
is a third with which to compare them.
When I was in SW I was very clear about what we were trying
to do. We were trying to build the revolutionary party. You cannot get rid of
capitalism through reforms; it cannot be reformed; a revolution is needed. And
the working class needs a revolutionary socialist organisation to give the lead
in the revolutionary struggle. It followed that the party organ, Socialist Worker,
was an important tool for helping to shape and build the party – its' scaffolding.
We were told that it was a party of leaders. But nobody
really believed that we were in a single tier organisation. There was an
acceptance that some were better at being leaders than others. That didn’t
matter. It was all done in the cause of ‘Building the Party’. You had to
consciously subordinate yourself to the rule of the ‘centre’ to the industrial
organiser; to the district organiser. But that was done willingly. We trusted
those in the leadership to, on the whole, make good decisions. Sometimes
mistakes were made, but again, and of course as in life elsewhere, people make
mistakes. Even when things were not going too well, comrades were happy to keep
heads down and keep pushing on with whatever party building project was under
way.
For most of my time in the party – up until about 2008 –
that way of working was good. You always had the sense (at least I did) that we
were doing the right thing and things couldn’t really be done any better given
the objective circumstances. The party was building for a lot of that time. It
grew from around 4,500 when I joined in 1989 to about 10,000 in 2000. The ten
thousand figure is disputed, but there really was actual growth – an almost
doubling of the membership.
For me, things started to go wrong after the great crash of
2008. I can almost pin point it to an exact time of day (you may laugh, but that’s what I think). I
think it was September 14th 2008, when it was announced that Lehman
Brothers had collapsed. At around that time the first statements that there was
going to be a bailout of the biggest banks in the world were broadcast on the
telly. When I heard that I immediately said to myself ‘and they will be clawing
that back from us’ It would be like the Poll Tax on steroids. I went to a
meeting at the University of London Union organised by SW (incidentally Delta*
was the main speaker) and put my hand up wanting to speak about my take on the
crisis. I wasn’t called. That wasn’t unusual. The trusted leaders usually got
called to speak. You were lucky if you weren’t
a recognised leader member to be called to speak.
If I had been called, I would have said that this crash
gives us a great opportunity. Like the poll tax, the clawback will affect
everybody – every worker. And that could be the governments' and their
capitalist friends their Achilles Heel.
Governments do not ever take on the whole of the working class at the same
time. They use divide and rule tactics.
The bailout with the inevitable clawback gave us the opportunity to
attempt to unite the working class
against the austerity that will surely be coming down the tracks. I had a
letter published in SW on the issue some months later.
But what did the party do in response to the crash? Zilch,
Nada, Nothing.
Their mantra was ‘ you can not fight a recession’ and ‘you
cannot suck a fightback out of your thumb’
Of course you cannot fight a recession and nobody as far as
I know was saying that. I found out a long time later that others had reached the same conclusion as me, but
(because of the way dissent in the party was handled) I did not hear that or
get to talk to them.
In fact the Poll Tax campaign was sucked out of our thumb. It was built bottom up from the ground
in a sustained eighteen month campaign which united as many strands of
resistance as was possible. And it won. It was a major (and for me
inexplicable) mistake of the party to not re-orientate - and attempt to build a
campaign using lessons from the successful Anti Poll Tax campaign from the late
eighties - after the banking crisis of 2008.
From then on, I started to trust less and less, the
decisions of the leadership and became critical of the direction the party was
going in. But I remained in the party, hopeful that better judgement would
materialise in the future struggles.
A large proportion (not all, but a significant number) of
the group that eventually emerged as RS21 were full timers in the SW – People
who worked for the paper and worked on the admin of the party. This group
backed to the hilt and argued for and carried out (they had to, it was their
job), the decisions of the central committee.
Then came the traumatic crisis in the party caused by the (alleged
and disputed admittedly**) actions of the leading member of the central
committee of the Socialist Workers Party.
The trauma that overwhelmed the party in 2012 – 2014 was an
accident waiting to happen.
In a sexist, racist, homophobic, society, everybody in that
society has those backward ideas in their head -‘ The ruling ideas in any
society are those of the ruling class’ -
however under control they may be. Just because you are on the central
committee of a revolutionary organisation, that in itself does not shield you,
free you, exempt you, from holding those notions. And, always, there exists the
possibility that you could act, however involuntarily, on them. You can
recognise their backwardness and guard yourself against them and fight against
people who are overtly racist or sexist
or homophobic (and that is not an exhaustive list) etc, but you cannot
obliterate the notions themselves. This is not to excuse any racist, sexist,
homophobic, behaviour, but to recognise the existence of the ideas, and the danger they represent.
One of the first books I was read as a child was blatantly
racist with racist stories and pictures and words; and for many years as I was
growing up, homosexuality was an illegal practice; my mother was, as a great
many women were (and still even now are) casually treated a bit like a modern
slave. Racist, homophobic and sexist ideas are in peoples’ heads. How could
they not be? We have been brought up with them. Young people have had a
different experience, but the main point still applies.
My conclusion is that we have to build our party in a
defensive way. In such a way that, if and when a leading member fails to live
up to the highest revolutionary standards, that it doesn’t bring the whole
project crashing down. We must not allow that kind of vulnerability to arise.
We need a discussion on the best way forward – on how to
build a more robust organisation or set of organisations. I think we need a
looser structure. The ‘slate’ method of leadership is problematical. We can only vote for the slate and the slate
votes for itself. This tends to
perpetuate the vulnerability and increases the likelihood of further trouble in
the future. There is a history of leadership worship leading to the collapse of
left parties. We need to be wary of leadership worship. Leaders often let us
down. And if they are the head of the single ‘vanguard’ party that is asking
for trouble.
When I was in RS21 I suggested that we should have an open
discussion –both within RS21 and then with Socialist Worker and within the
working class as a whole about the kind of party that we need.
Unfortunately my suggestion was not taken seriously.
This leads me on to my thoughts on RS21.
What does it mean anyway.
It means arse to anyone.
(See what I did there? Lol)
It means arse to anyone.
(See what I did there? Lol)
(When I resigned from RS21, my anger had reached white heat, so, apologies if my use of that four letter word offends anyone).
The anger came from many things.
There used to be an organisation in the eighties and early
90s called the RCP. They had a magazine called Living Marxism. They were not an
organisation that tried to build. Their
name implied revolutionary communism, but I had no idea what they were trying
to do. They were just there. They had this nice shiny magazine with the picture
of their leader on it. I forget how they disappeared, but before they did they
changed the name of their magazine to LM.
It meant nothing. They weren’t trying to build. RS21 is like that.
In Socialist Worker,
I knew why I was selling the paper. We were trying to build a
revolutionary party and use the paper to help us in that work.
I couldn’t bring myself to even try selling the RS21
magazine because I didn’t know what it was for. It had some good articles and
looked nice and shiny, but that was it. We might just as well have tried
selling the Daily Mirror or the New Scientist.
When I was in that outfit, only a core group would
automatically get their writing published. I never felt it was my magazine. There
was a hierarchy; it was a two tier organisation even though there had been no
proper discussion of this.
From the outset, and actually from before I joined, when it was still a faction within SW, I sensed
that the organisation was undemocratic. I hoped this would change, but I was to
be disappointed.
There was what I called an ‘undeclared social faction’ in
existence. At the first National meeting event in Brixton, a posse of members
left the pub we were gathered in after the event, and, with no announcement,
marched out en masse leaving us, the remainder, to socialise among ourselves.
Nice.
There are a lot of very decent and lovely people in RS21,
just as there were in SW. I do not have a beef really with any particular
people. I do have a beef with how the organisation works. But that of course is
tied up with those same people.
So this is how I characterise some of this group.
Some of the new RS21 group had been full timers with the party. On leaving, they now found themselves unemployed professional revolutionaries. Professional
revolutionaries without a job. And, to boot, professional revolutionaries who
were used to carrying out the ‘centralism’ part of the ‘democratic centralism’
organisational method that SW functions by. They carried out the dirty work of
centralism – the bending of the stick – the persuasion of those who were deemed
to be not helpful to toe the line. A lot of them were crap at it, but they
tried to crack the centralist whip. (In a nutshell democratic centralism is an
organisational concept meaning decisions are arrived at democratically by the
whole organisation, and then, once the policy is decided on, that policy is
implemented across the organisation by the central leadership)
Adding to that, the leadership tends to select its
successors from the full timers – from those who proved themselves compliant to the leadership and who were trained and in the habit of giving
out orders. The professional revolutionaries saw themselves as the leadership
in waiting.
They had a little bit of power and it would not be
surprising if they felt the loss of that little bit of power when they resigned
after building the opposition faction.
It was as if hey felt a sense of entitlement, stemming from their habitual roles in the old organisation.
It was as if hey felt a sense of entitlement, stemming from their habitual roles in the old organisation.
Those habits were carried over the new organisation, RS21. It
always felt to me like a two tier organisation, when it could and should have been flat. We needed a true party of leaders, not another party of leaders and
followers. Instead, we got, for one example, the
appointment, with hardly any discussion on the pros and cons of it of a middle
aged (for RS21!) white academic male as a paid worker. For me, we’ve had enough
of posh academics running the show into
the ground in SW. We don’t need a re run of that. It sends out the wrong
message. A lot of people I spoke to
about that appointment over their heads were disappointed with that important
policy change. This is because he who pays the piper calls the tune. The friends of the full timer control interventions and policy.
So the problem of RS21 is that it is a chip off the old
block. All the problems of Socialist Worker are there in embryo in RS21.
But the strengths of Socialist Worker – its clear sense of
direction and purpose for example, are just not there. There are good things
about RS21. They have tried. That’s good. They have tried to come up with some
new political analyses – not amounting to much for me though, and in fact, I
have sensed, at least in one Youtube video I have seen, which was presented by
one of the self appointed leaders - a
sense of despair – a questioning of whether the working class has the actual
power or ability to change the world. Oh dear.
A general cannot prepare to go into battle discussing defeat.
I think we need a revolutionary socialist organisation. But
we need one that is capable of winning
the hundreds of thousands of new people that are joining the Labour party. I
think that party could well have been Socialist Worker if it had been able to
make a change to its ossified leadership methodology. Alas that is too late
right now. But they will still have a part to play. That party is full of brilliant class
fighters. It needs to drop the thuggish
centralism and remake itself.
Tony Cliff did point us in the right direction. Again alas,
he died too soon.
Something he said sticks in my mind. Unusually, the analysis
isn’t taken to its conclusion (or more probably, I missed it) so:
Cliff said the revolution will be led by a 19 year old black
lesbian.
Actually, Cliff, if writing today, would have said that the
revolution will be led by a 19 year old black, disabled Moslem lesbian. Why?
They have the most to win. But that isn’t my point.
Cliff was the leader of the party which, although this is
not normally explicitly stated, sees itself as the vanguard party - the
vanguard of the coming revolution when it happens. But this leaves us with a
gaping hole. Because the party is not and (given the current stranglehold on
leadership by the current CC, will never be)
led by that 19 year old. There is not a mechanism currently as the SWP
is set up for, for any such person to emerge within the leadership of the SWP,
A different
structure, a more loose form of Democratic centralism is needed.
Why am I joining Labour then?
One of the things drummed in to me in my SW days is the
maxim - you cannot be a socialist by yourself. In other words, you need to work
with other socialists; you need to be in an organisation of some sort. I still
agree with that. By yourself, you can maybe change some things, but you cannot
change the world all by yourself. The
question then – what organisation, or what kind of organisation, do I need to
be in - presents itself to anyone who concludes that - because of what they
know is happening to billions of people and to the earth itself - that major
political change is needed if we want a safe planet.
I think that the working class needs a revolutionary
organisation – one that argues for and
builds towards a revolutionary change going beyond capitalism. However, in my
opinion now, based on my experience in the two groups I have been a member of
and which do argue for that kind of change, an organisation capable of building
has yet to be formed.
In the absence of the existence of that organisation, right
now seems to be a good time for a
socialist without a party to join Labour. Why?
Because it has hundreds of thousands of new people joining and has a
left wing MP beating the right wing, hands down, in the leadership contest.
Although I have joined with an open mind and open heart it is also with no
illusions. A leopard cannot change its spots. But I think its better to be in a
party full of people that want to see change and to work together with them to
try to achieve that change, than not to be in any group - even if you think
that some of the basic political analysis of the party is wrong. Labour is now
moving in the right direction – even if it does not have the fuel to carry us
to the final destination.
* and ** This refers to the SW central committee member at the eye of the storm during the SWP crisis 2012/ 2013 I have a little bit to say about that crisis but am going to leave it to another post.
* and ** This refers to the SW central committee member at the eye of the storm during the SWP crisis 2012/ 2013 I have a little bit to say about that crisis but am going to leave it to another post.
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