Write-up of the discussion, ‘The Future of the Left’, discussion meeting, 4 October 2007, from her notes from the meeting, by CM.

The meeting was (very ably) chaired by DP. There was a go-round to introduce ourselves, we were pleased to welcome JQ who is new to the group, and DP reported that BE is recovering from his serious illness, then a challenging (but uninterrupted) introductory talk, followed by lively contributions to the discussion. [CM had to leave before the end to catch a train.]
NB: We need to discuss how to attract more people to our meetings, which have been really interesting.

Introductory talk (from CM’s notes hence corrections welcome):

JT: In this discussion I am going to work back to the slogan ‘Unity of Marxists around Marx’s programme.’

A godsend for this talk has been the Respect Party nightmare.

Originally Respect was a coalition between George Galloway (GG) and rightwing Moslems plus the SWP who did the legwork. It is now falling to bits, currently there is a temporary compromise, with the SWP on a war footing, with a factional struggle going on, and probably GG will go.

This is pathetic, but it illustrates a 1930s strategy on a very small scale.

After Hitler took power Cominterns became antifascist fronts and allied themselves with Liberal forces. This is known as a Popular Front (PF) strategy, where the leftwing tries to keep together and has a pivotal role. In western and southern Europe, especially in Italy, the communists were strongest, and could have taken power legally. In Italy there were hundreds of thousands of communists, and it was not in their interests to keep on the Trots.

However a PF comes to lean to the right, relying on the Liberals, having nowhere else to go, the Centre being the main voice of the Left anyhow. The Liberals have more options, they can line up with conservatives, Christians, other rightwing forces. They hold a gun to the head of the centre faction which capitulates to the rightwing.

Italy went for a national government of Christian Democrats.

In the recent case of Respect, the SWP would sell out for something-or-other, for example to keep on board a Bengali businessman with ambitions to be on the Council. Hence there is no point in having a political programme. Again to keep in with partners, they have refused to stand up for gay rights.

I can’t say this kind of strategy for the Left has no future; this kind of thing will be tried again, but I’m not looking to that.

It might be possible to take power in one country, but no hope from that because of being tied to rightwing forces. At least it indicates there’s something in the air, and we could take advantage somewhere down the line.

On the Trots, their main problem is they often have an inflated view of their own importance. Books like The Golden Thread present a myth of a magical line from Lenin to some current theorist: from Third International until 1928, Fourth until ruined in 1953 and so on, in a magic thread, like prophets, they build up their own importance. This happened especially after the War, when a transitional programme would take advantage of the Death Agony of Capitalism.

At the Forth International there were 5000 people in the entire world, needing to be multiplied a million-fold to get a revolution.

The Trots’ strategy is to make a hocus-pocus demand, for example that capitalism open all its books to reveal how it makes its money; this is of course refused, which is supposed to enrage the working class to such an extent that it leads to revolution.

After WWI this might have been possible, just as Trotsky believed that capitalism would not survive the war. The Trots have kept that strategy, eg in the current Socialist Party of England and Wales, which have ‘Transitional Demands’ to lead to all becoming revolutionary, but the result is always that the people who picked up on this would see it failing and become demoralised and drop out of politics altogether.

The other strategy is to just wait for the working class to do it for themselves.

There’s a parallel problem with the Left as traditionally organised which results in split after split after split, giving rise to around a hundred sects. No one can really recruit.

On demos, if there were THE Marxist Party, there would be a clear choice: They or It. What we see is several people saying the same things but selling different papers, each recruits from the people on the demo maybe 40-50, or 5, but we need thousands.

Divisions are an obstacle. The future needs to be Unity of Marxists around Marx’s programme.

For example, take a march re Palestine, there are SWP placards, leaflets, fair enough, unity in action, they all shout the same thing while there’s one only. But the rest of the year, anyone who think differently, for example expressing a preference for two-state rather than one-state solution, they have to split off in order to have their line.

The solution to this is to say that on any issue while not on actions, they have to allow people to speak out, otherwise again split after split after split…

[JT went on to mention instances of particular personalities, and their rifts and splits, and others joined in.]

Open discussion:

JQ (addressed to JT): I’ve met George Galloway, what do you think of him?

JT: Best if others have their say.

GB: I love JT’s metaphors! and I have my own: firstly I’m in a museum and this is the young curator; secondly, people in a train crash, trying to do what they’ve done before in a new situation.

Your history is patchy to say the least. Marx said he was not a Marxist and he was right. His ideas should not result in an ‘-ism’. Radical thought only lives by discontinuity. they pass on Marxism but all mean different things by that conception. They don’t let non-Marxists run the Party, let them debate but if they move towards leadership, throw them out, it’s like a double-decker bus, debate ideas in the bus, meanwhile the driver takes it where he likes. The whole thing is a dead loss.

CM: I do agree with JT, especially about sectarianism in its various guises, and about the need for the Left to come together, perhaps under the slogan ‘Unity of Marxists around Marx’s programme’, although in a book I’ve been reading: Todd May’s, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, it is said that Marxism has failed, mainly because the prediction of increasing immiseration of the proletariat didn’t materialise. That may be true in the developed world but not overall, globally. Capital can move to where labour is cheapest and most compliant, regulation on the environment is weakest and raw materials are cheapest, whereas people, environment and resources cannot move. But to bring the entire world proletariat together demanding revolution (the SPGB agenda) doesn’t seem possible, especially through the ballot box. I tend to agree with Bakunin that representative democracy isn’t democracy – we all know that and are cynical about this coming charade, an election called for by the media – and I like Kropotkin’s vision (in Fugitive Writings) of grassroots participative democracy, with a bit of gold needed for what the local economy cannot provide – for Kropotkin’s model that was tea and kerosene. I’m involved with a group called World in Common which was formed to address the problem of splits on the Left, and it’s open to discussion about alternative futures (unlike the SPGB that it split off from where it’s been argued that Socialists now should not be ‘drawing up a blueprint for a future socialist society’; that will be up to the people when capitalism ahs been overturned), and are even open to discussing people trying socialist-like lifestyles, with local community-building, LETS and so on.

DP: I’m interested to note that we’ve barely mentioned the impending election, a recognition that the Labour Party (LP) is nothing to do with socialism. On the history of Respect and Galloway (GG), in 2001 the Left outside the LP formed the Socialist Alliance (SA), with the biggest contingent being the SWP, and they closed the SA down in favour of a coalition with the Muslim Association of Britain. A huge chunk of the SA opposed this, but some of those joined Respect anyway. In Exeter half of the SA group went with the SWP, half did not, but that half has dwindled and we’re left with Exeter Socialists.

Respect is three years old now. GG has written a document about the original intention. On Leftwing blogs there have been accounts of rows between GG and Tower Hamlets, and its Muslim businessmen who were against the Iraq war. Previously SWP has just withdrawn, let Respect wither. JQ asked about GG, and I’d say we can admire him for his brilliant speech to Congress, and being good on Cuba, but his record on socialist perspective and class issues is atrocious. His record of attendance in Parliament is in the bottom ten. He is a maverick and careerist – I don’t like the guy.

Looking at the Left in the LP, they failed to get a candidate for the leadership against Brown. The rules of the LP have changed such that a constituency Party is no longer allowed to put a resolution on the Party Conference agenda. Is that why Tony Benn was reported as saying, ‘Is this my last Conference?’

The Left outside the LP is also a mess. When the SWP smashed the SA, the latter was demoralised. The next biggest group to the SWP is the Socialist Party of England and Wales (SPEW), made up from what was Militant in the LP.

In 2002/3 the RMT Union was expelled from the LP for supporting the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), and the FBU disaffiliated. The SA was looking to the SSP as a model, but that is now split. There used to be an active Left presence in Scotland, now none.

On ‘Unity of Marxists around Marx’s programme’, I have a deep sympathy. From these discussions it is evident that we agree that capitalism is the problem, and that’s what we need to deal with, and we’re not enthusiastic for Popular Front-ish stuff.

Being anti-war is not good enough; both the Liberal Democrats and the Liberal Party were anti-war, and Respect had to drop everything else; all they kept was anti-war.

PH: My perspective is I’m entirely unencumbered with any Socialist education. I like the ‘ Exeter’ in Exeter Socialists. Two things follow. Do we actually want power? or endlessly dividing in two?, splitting the vote because of ideological purity? The Great British Public don’t respect ideological purity. We have the idea that the French are more ideological, and I note that the logo of the EDF, Electricité de France is a bloke throwing a Molotov cocktail! The right wing don’t suffer from this fragmentation.

We need public ownership of drug research – why don’t we have that? – it’s bizarre.

On capitalists in leftist parties, we are a nation of shopkeepers, we need small businesses, trading locally.

I’ve been involved with Animal Rights, and they have splits too. For example, a group of them were trying to organise a ceilidh and needed beer etc., and had a stall, and a group of hard-line vegans came along and publicly accused them of animal cruelty because they hadn’t had vegan beer (with no fish used in the filings). This is an example of there always being people who fail to see the broader picture.

GB: These groups are just like religious cults; anyone can join as long as ‘we’ run it – the group grows with a bunch of lively people, and then it splits. Political sects have the same characteristics, split over mad obsessions.

My faith is in the working class as a living force opposed to the capitalist class due to the economic relations. Since the Soviet Union collapsed the Trots have collapsed because there is nothing to oppose. A new revolution arises from the class struggle, the working class will make its own history. What goes on is a sad waste of devotion.

JT (summing up): On poststructuralist anarchism and their dismissal of old myths like immiseration, Marx would have covered this in Volume I of Capital which he didn’t finish, so that didn’t take account of the working class fighting back.

On Kropotkin, I have some sympathy with the SPGB on not ‘drawing up a blueprint…’ because it’s literally true that it’ll be out of our hands. Some people are inclined to cook up schemes for the perfect society, eg what colour to wear, for no real reason.

On Galloway, we can see him as a fellow traveller without someone to travel with, but he has a history, such as with Saddam Hussein, whereby he’d have anyone on board. He’s an old-fashioned Stalinist who happened to be in the Labour Party. On one level he’s one of us so legitimate on his speech to the Senate.

On GB’s ‘I am not a Marxist’, that was said in a letter to Paul Lafarge who was organising in the Communist League, into the Foucault thing and overly anti-Hegelian, whether concepts or means of production.

Today there are still survivals of medieval times, the monarchy etc., but also the stock systems of the future.

I’m an Althusserian. In conclusion I’d say that workers have to do it themselves. I’m not saying we should subscribe to this or that programme; Marxism is incredibly complicated.

CM had to leave at this point; if anyone has noted down or remembered what else was said, please let her know.

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