The Nation State: facts and desires

The nation state is the prime unit of focus in politics, but should it be?

Despite talk of globalisation, in the developed capitalist world today the nation state remains the key unit of political organisation and identity. It possesses a monopoly of violence over its territory, supported by its legal system, bureaucracy and has control of the vast bulk of money held as public funds. Neither sub-units, such as regional authorities, nor supranational ones, such as the European Union, come anywhere near to outweighing the political might of the nation state. That thesis was never proved more amply than during the Catalan Independence referendum fiasco on 1 October 2017.

Several other West European states (e.g. Britain and Belgium) contain nationalist and separatist tendencies. While such autonomous movements should not be politically underestimated, it should be noted that not one state in western Europe has been broken up in this way since 1945. The devolved units, such as Scotland and Catalonia, remain very much secondary to the old political states of which they are still part.

Nonetheless, the independent power and room for manoeuvre of the nation state has weakened in the last thirty years on account of globalisation - or to say that more precisely, the free movement of financial capital, the growing role of transnational corporations and transnational political agreements (e.g. the Schengen open borders agreement) Yet, that does not change the fundamental power of the nation state, the real power of which was most clearly demonstrated in the near financial meltdown in 2008. Collapsing banks could only be rescued by subsidies from nation states, while supranational bodies such as the EU proved themselves weak and ineffective.

An entirely different question is: should the nation state be the exclusive focus for the political left? The answer is no for at least two reasons: first nationalism by its nature not only creates a community of "insiders," imagined or otherwise, for those who are deemed part of the nation, but by the same token it also identifies and excludes those who are not deemed to part of the nation. The striving for socialism, tactical consideration aside, can never be based on preference for one set of people defined by citizenship or ethnicity at the expense of others, because socialism is properly anchored in principles of universalism and internationalism.

The second reason is practical. Reformism is about progressive change brought about by the state, nearly always with popular pressure from below. It is indeed true that in the so-called Golden Years, late 1940s to the mid 1970s, the nation state in every West European democracy did bring about meaningful reform in favour of working people. Thus we can clearly see that, though the state is an instrument of capitalist power, it also has the ability to regulate capitalism and can do so on occasion against the immediate interests of capitalists. And today, in so far as globalisation has diminished the power of the national state, the space for progressive reform lost to the nation state can only be taken up by supranational bodies – and in Europe that mean the EU. Such reform is, of course, utterly unrealistic if conceived as the EU alone acting against member states, but is perfectly feasible if it were the EU acting in coalition with several of its big member states - even though, sadly, that opportunity has been lost to the British Left on account of Brexit.

Does socialist consciousness originate in the working class?

The claim that socialist consciousness has and will emerge in the working class is a dogma without evidence behind it.

If by socialist consciousness one means a relatively well worked out theory of how society is and how it should be, then socialist consciousness has seldom originated, nor flourished, as a major force among working people.

Socialist ideas have historically originated in the minds of intellectuals (e.g. Marx, Methodist reformers). In the case of Karl Marx his discovery of historical materialism was based on borrowings from haut-bourgeois intellectuals, especially Hegel (history as an all-embracing totality) and Feuerbach (being determines thinking and not vice versa). Of course, while intellectuals discovered and articulated historical materialism, the socio-material conditions had to be right for their emergence, and for them to have relevance. That proves the rule that the generation of ideas, even Marxist ones, must be grounded in social-material reality.

Once in the world, socialist ideas were then adopted by the leaders of political parties, either because they believed them to be correct and helpful, or for more opportunistic reasons. In the last century, large numbers of workers and others voted for these parties in many developed countries because ordinary people felt left-wing parties better represented their practical interests than did non-socialist ones.

Only a tiny fraction of people in manual jobs ever concerned themselves with the theoretical and ideological issues connected with socialism, probably fewer people than were involved in religious sects. Remember George Orwell entering Catholic workers houses in the 1930s: the communist newspaper Daily Worker on the table and a crucifix on the wall.

One such exception in the twentieth century was an interest in socialist theory among a minority of skilled workers, particularly those working alone. We could mention the watchmakers of Jena, but also the role of cobblers, tailors and more recently left-wing train drivers in the ASLEF trade union in Britain.

Socialists were also likely to be found among upwardly mobile families whose members had left the manual working class. The connection between socialist belief, education and upward social mobility was well established in the twentieth century. This linkage is now largely something of the past.

Nevertheless the bulk of those interested in socialist and Marxist ideas are – and historically have always been – found among the intelligentsia. It is here among teachers and other professionals that discussions of what socialism is and how it can be realised have always been a fascinating topic for a minority.

Whether and how a socialist consciousness could emerge today, and whether and how socialist consciousness could embed itself among ordinary working people are difficult issues.

Chesterfield Socialist Conference 1987

The Chesterfield Socialist Conference of 1987 attempted to revitalise the left in Britain. Instead it marked its demise.

The year 1987 was an important year, not just because I failed my driving test the day after Mrs Thatcher won her third term in office, but because – although I did not know it at the time – events that year would signal a speeding up in the collapse of the left in Britain.

In October 1987, the first Socialist Conference was held in Chesterfield, the mining constituency which Tony Been famously won in a byelection in 1984. Ralph Miliband described the conference, which brought together the Labour left with several outside groups and parties, as the biggest meeting of socialists since the Leeds Convention in 1918. Benn, Miliband and Eric Heffer all gave powerful orations in the hope of heralding in a rebirth of the radical left in British politics.

Yet, it was not to be. Kinnock (with Hattersley, Smith, Kaufmann and the then youngsters Blair and Brown in tow) announced a policy review, misnamed ‘Labour Listens’ which meant that the leadership listened to everybody except socialists. The remaining socialist policies were either dropped or sidelined. Inside the party de-democratisation took hold and the socialist left was marginalised or expelled. In this stifling atmosphere of party discipline, Kinnock stumbled on until losing to the Tories yet again in 1992.

John Smith’s leadership 1992-94 promised a Labour Party consolidation on the basis of some kind of mild social democracy – and, but for his death, he would have taken Labour to victory in 1997.

But that was not to be, either. In 1994 (the last contested Labour leadership election until 2010), desperate for success, Labour elected Tony Blair, whose drift to the right in the next decade and half would have been unimaginable in the early nineties. So New Labour was born and the Left and socialism ceased to be.

Vladimir Derer: his argument was correct

The election of Jeremy Corbyn seems to suggest that the way forward for the political left is through the Labour Party.

I remember back to a winter’s evening in the mid 1980s when Vladimir Derer addressed a meeting in the Exeter City Library. The gathering wasn’t heavily attended, with only a handful of Labour left people from Exeter and the south Devon area, plus a couple of activists from the non-Labour Party sects, communist and Trotskyist. Derer had already passed the height of his influence and the majority of Exeter Labour Party had by then already turned their back on him.

To the younger generation today, Derer’s name and work are not well-known; yet in the 1970s and early 1980s he was the organisational driving force behind the move to the left in Labour Party. Earlier, in the 1950s and 1960s, the Labour Party had been comfortably in the grip of leaders who pursued mild social amelioration from inside the Parliamentary party. But by the early 1970s several things had changed: economic growth had faltered, so hard choice about who got what had to be made; power in the trade unions had partially shifted to radical shop stewards; and the constituency Labour Parties were gaining an influx of young left-wingers. The situation was ripe for change.

Derer believed that the key to socialist reform lay in and through the Labour Party. His thesis was both articulate and simple: in the advanced capitalist countries no new socialist parties had emerged as a significant political force since the formation of the Third International in the 1920s, and therefore effective socialist activity could only take place inside the prevailing party of the centre-left, by which he meant the Labour Party in Britain. Opportunities (not opportunism), he argued, were few and far between and had to be seized when available. Such an opportunity was now presenting itself.

The problem, though, with the Labour Party left in the 1970s was that it ranged from left-wing social democrats though to revolutionary Trotskyite groups, so building a unity based on policy was impractical. Yet, the party could be moved leftwards by democratisation: if the rank and file elected and controlled the leadership, then the result would a left-wing party. To that end the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy was formed in 1973 and Derer became its secretary in 1974. The drive to the left was by means of an intra-party struggle for party democracy.

The left reached its peak of influence in the Party in 1980. In 1981 the tide turned: Tony Benn failed in his attempt to take the deputy leadership and the right regained control of the Party’s National Executive Committee. Though the final reckoning wasn’t fully apparent until a few years later, the left had lost the fight for the Labour Party; and the steady march to the right had begun.

The lean years for the left 1983-2015

The third of a century leading up to sudden and unexpected election of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader in September 2015 was one of almost continual and progressive defeat for the left inside the party. There were two phases of defeat. The first was under the leadership of Neil Kinnock (1983-92) plus the short reign of John Smith (1992-94) in which the divide in the Labour party was mainly about alternative economic policies. Labour’s right believed, economic conditions permitting, in taxing, spending and regulating to ameliorate the conditions of working people. The left believed economic power (nationalisation and worker’s control) was needed to change the ways of capitalism, if not to abolish capitalism all together. But some kind of compromise between the two positions was theoretically possible, even if difficult to achieve. Though the role of the left diminished, particularly after the 1987 election defeat, the left still possessed a minor influence over policy.

The second period began in 1994 with arrival of Tony Blair and the birth of New Labour. Social democracy and redistribution were thrown out in favour of full acceptance of unbridled market capitalism. Working people were to be slotted into capitalism and not have resources re-directed to them; public provision in health education and elsewhere was to be provided by private capital and private management. Labour in government after 1997 saw a bonfire of everything traditional Labour, left or right, had ever stood for: the acceptance of growing inequality, with Blair flaunting his and New Labour’s relationship with the super-rich; a love affair with the far right around the globe which led to Britain eagerly following President Bush into the Iraq War in 2003; and at home New Labour oversaw a growing illiberalism manifesting itself in an expansion police powers and a diminution of civil liberties.

Life inside the Labour Party fundamentally changed, too. Since the eighties, but particularly since the arrival of Blair and New Labour in 1994, the Party structures were de-democratised, conferences choreographed from above; meaningless forms of consultation replaced intra-party elections. Worse still, the Left vacated the Party leaving a membership consisting mainly of municipal careerists and their hangers-on. Outside the ranks of Labour, no new left-wing Party established itself, even after Labour abandoned social democracy in the 1990s. The Green Party remained fixed in a niche partly of its own making; and George Galloway’s ephemeral Respect Party was both a parody and betrayal of socialist values. So when Labour lost office in 2010, with its lowest share of the poll since 1983, it was empty and irrelevant in the face of the financial crisis that had engulfed Britain and the world since 2008.

The Corbyn revival

In 2010 Labour had its first contested leadership election for sixteen years. In a feeble reaction against the excesses of New Labourism, its members – and particularly its trade union members - opted for Ed as opposed to David Miliband. The new leader proved not just personally ineffective, but also surrounded himself by a team of people like himself who had made their careers during New Labour’s neo-liberal years in government. For this reason, the Labour leadership were utterly hamstrung in their ability to stand up for working people, and went into the 2015 election without any clear message and lost. Ed Miliband resigned as leader within hours of defeat.

The right had ruled the labour Party for decades unchallenged and had grown complacent. In a move to weaken the trade unions, the election of the leader was turned into a direct vote of all party members, registered Labour trade unionists and any Labour supporter who paid £3. The veteran left-winger, Jeremy Corbyn who had entered Parliament in 1983 just managed to get onto the ballot paper and then unexpectedly went on to win with 59% of the vote. New Labour was slapped in the face by Corbyn-supporting party members, who had been sidelined for years, but still harboured progressive thoughts. Corbyn also won among trade unionists, manual and non manual in both the public and private sectors. Workers were fed up; they had been told for years to hang onto New Labour, even though despised them, lest things be worse for them under the Tories. And finally new ranks of Corbyn activists sprang up among the educated young, whose educational debts and abysmal prospects in housing and employment consigned them to a life of misery.

Furious at Corbyn’s election to the leadership, a majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party did all they could to destabilise him: a series a staged resignations from his shadow cabinet and a vote of no confidence in him, culminating in a leadership challenge by Owen Smith. The NEC did all it could to bias the election against Corbyn: 130 000 new party members, disproportionally Corbyn supporters, were denied a vote, thousands more were expelled or suspended for any number of dubious reasons. Yet, Corbyn triumphed, boosting his vote to 62%. And though the right-wing, by bureaucratic manoeuvring, has managed to keep control of the NEC, nonetheless today the Left is a powerful force in the Labour Party, and has a reasonable chance of taking control of it.

And Vladimir Derer

Vladimir Derer died in June 2014, so like Tony Benn who had passed away three months earlier, he never saw the election of victory of Jeremy Corbyn. Yet all the evidence points to his vindication. Left activism is more effective inside Labour than outside it: and it was to Labour that progressive people turned after 2015, not to smaller left parties or to new parties. The proof will never be final but today seems to prove the correctness of an analysis penned by Derer four decades earlier.

Facebook: posting links is no substitute for analysis

Facebook does provide a channel for political communication, but those who merely post links to online material are not providing the necessary analysis.

From the 1980s I recall an elderly left-wing gentleman, who raged against all forms of social injustice, with a particular emphasis on the betrayal of socialism by the right-wing leaders of the Labour Party. To make his case, he pushed his bicycle around the town, cloth carrier-bags dangling from the handlebars, shoving annotated newspaper cuttings though the letterboxes of those left-wing activists who might read them.

If you met him you would certainly get an earful, but if you didn’t you had to piece together his views from reading other people’s. Were he alive today, I am sure he would be on Facebook, writing little, but posting links to articles. And sadly, that is the communicative capacity limit for many of my Facebook “friends,'”  just a stream of posts consisting of links to other material. They don’t write much themselves, so all I know about their political views is garnered from the links to articles which they suggest that I should read.

Well, what’s wrong with just posting links? True, good material on the net needs to be passed around. But anybody who thinks that he or she is enhancing his or her political analysis by this method is as deluded as a carpenter who thinks he is developing his chair-making skills by sitting on them and recommending them to others. It’s only when you pick up your pen – or today, open a Word document – that you develop the range and consistency of your own thinking.

The best way to learn is to get things wrong unintentionally. Make a slip and a friend will correct you in polemic; post a link to an article written by a professional journalist for another audience and most likely there will be no response. Just by re-posting other people's writing and by "liking," the gaps in your own thinking remain and the ability to articulate an idea or point never develops.

Even on the net people need to make themselves known as political personalities worthy of being listened to. A political activist needs a field of activity and interest; the information in the articles of professional journalists and academics needs to be digested, re-interpreted and re-focused according to local political need, not just re-posted.

Prospects for the Left in Britain - as seen in 2010

The prospects for the British Left seem dire; and the situation is entirely different from in the past.  (Written in 2010)

Overall, I am extremely pessimistic about the prospect of building a progressive movement in Britain. I had hoped in the mid-2000s that the total abandonment by New Labour of progressive politics in general and the huge opposition to the Iraq War in particular would lead to a serious organisation to the left of Labour coming into existence. Instead, all we got was George Galloway blending his own egocentric personality with an illiberal cultural relativist agenda in the form of his politically marginal Respect Party.

Since 2010 Labour has been in opposition to the Conservative Liberal Democrat coalition government. About what to do there are two contrasting opinions among people on the left.

On the one hand, there is the view that however awful New Labour was between 1997 and 2010 in government, nonetheless it is the only political organisation that working people have to advance their interests. We should, therefore, work for a Labour government to be elected in 2015 because even the worst Labour government is better than this. Of course in the meantime we can campaign and try to move Labour leftwards.

On the other hand, there is the view that the Blair-Brown governments crossed the Rubicon. New Labour in office abandoned social democracy, built up capitalist power and inequality, sought to diminish personal and civic liberties and actively promoted a sycophantic pro-Americanism around the globe. The people actively engaged in that project still lead the Labour Party today. Asking working people to put their faith and aspirations in Labour is, therefore, dishonest and will yield nothing but disappointment.

Superficially in this debate one can find similarities in the ending of the Blair-Brown governments in 2010 with the close of the Wilson-Callaghan years in 1979. Perhaps the most significant similarity is that Labour in opposition tends, at least initially after losing office, to start moving leftwards. And that was apparent in the symbolic election of Ed as opposed to David Miliband as party leader. But on closer examination there are two crucial differences between then and now.

First, unlike New Labour, the Labour Governments 1964-79 never abandoned social democracy. Wilson’s self-declared remit was left-leaning: to advance the well-being of working people within the post-war consensus and to be progressive in social, civic and personal affairs. In the latter, if not so much in the former, Labour chalked up significant success: abolition of the death penalty, legalisation of male homosexuality and abortion, lowering the age of majority to eighteen, etc. So in 1979 one could argue: “Labour is basically sound, but what we want is a more left-wing and progressive version of it. Let’s join and see what we can do”

The second crucial difference between now and then is that when Labour lost office in 1979, the left had never been so strong in the constituency parties and in the trade unions. There was real hope that by “mucking in” the left could win through. In 2010 Diane Abbott, the left-over of the Bennite Left was on the leadership ballot paper thanks only to the self-interested charity of New Labour MPs, who wanted to prevent the election being characterised as one between four white middle-class men. The movement behind Abbott was tiny and marginal. Few socialists remain active in the Labour Party.

My conclusion is that the situation in 2010 is fundamentally different from the one in 1979. The stain of New Labour cannot be washed away even in half a decade. Socialists cannot be, and cannot be seen to be, the junior partners of the people who managed New Labour after 1994, both in government and opposition. The Labour Party will not change its spots soon. If the left has a future it is not with Miliband and Balls. Tactically we might vote for them in elections, but that is all.

Jeremy Corbyn's stunning victory

The stunning victory of Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour leadership election on 12 September 2015 has changed the political game for the Left

One of the advantages of being a rather insignificant person is that I can be wrong about things without it having any great significance. I was among those who didn’t believe until it actually happened that the bureaucracy of the Labour Party, probably in cahoots with the security services, would allow Jeremy Corbyn to be elected leader of the Labour Party. But fortunately from my point of view the Labour Party bureaucracy screwed up to an extent that nothing could help them.

Ed Miliband thought that widening the leadership franchise to one-person-with-three-quid one vote would excite Britain’s middle class into choosing between a handful of New Labour politicians, and so bring them over to Labour. It failed: progressives and working people took up the offer and used it to batter New Labour. Then Labour MPs miscalculated in nominating Corbyn, thinking that a defeated left in the party would be better than facing a challenge to Labour from outside. But very soon they then had to contend with the fact that Corbyn was not about to be defeated. And even though they responded by disqualifying thousands of Labour supporters with the sole purpose of denying Corbyn votes, they failed to prevent his election. Corbyn won among party members, affiliate organisation members and registered supporters. And all together he won a stunning victory garnering just under 60% of the vote.

And I was wrong too about the Labour Party. I wrote recently: “[Since the 1990s] The Labour Party has swung to the right, and under the label of New Labour became a mere adjunct of capitalist power, while jettisoning any meaningful attempt to reform capitalism or the British state in a progressive direction. By the end of the 1990s, even before the Iraq War, I ceased to identify with Labour, and saw the way forward - if there were one - as outside the Labour Party.”

So I was wrong again. The election of Jeremy Corbyn with a quarter of a million votes is the greatest victory for the left since at least the defeat of the poll tax. But the way ahead is difficult. Not only will Corbyn face an onslaught from the media and the wider establishment, but also Labour MPs and and party bureaucracy will do what they can to undermine him. But all that underlies the key point: the coming political fight is now inside the Labour Party not outside it fiddling around in left groups. To the extent that parties like Left Unity played a role in bringing about Corbyn’s victory it won, but it no longer has a meaningful role opposing Corbyn’s Labour - certainly not in putting up a Left Unity candidate in Islington North.

The curse of nations

The European, and particularly British, political left is incarcerated in national parochialism

In the mid 1980s a group of socialists in Exeter decided to set up Exeter Labour Briefing which soon morphed into Devon Labour Briefing. We identified with the politics of London Labour Briefing (the capital city of the UK) and adopted the Labour Briefing rubric. At around the same time there was a Brighton Labour Briefing, a Dover Labour Briefing and so on. There were surprises in the bag when an Isle of Wight Labour Briefing was in the pipeline, but nobody expected, nor was there any talk of, for instance, a Calais Labour Briefing.

If there had been we would have said in surprise, “Yes, but their situation is so different; they’re part of French politics - and anyway how can we understand them unless they write in English, and why would they do that.” Very much the same applies today: North Devon may get its own branch of Left Unity, but North Brittany will not. Let’s unpack the obviousness behind all this.

Since the French Revolution, but particularly since the First World War, the nation state has become the main terrain of cultural and political identity. The legal and political structures of the state are the focus of identity and meaning for the state’s citizens, even its socialist ones. Knowledge of the political position facing people in the neighbouring states is usually thin on the ground. In addition, everyone in one state knows (or should know!) the state language, but armed with single language literacy, meaningful communication with citizens from another is rendered difficult to impossible.

The political and cultural zenith of the nation state occurred in the years following the Second World War, when nation-statism was bolstered by state economic planning and the welfare state. Since the 1980s neoliberalism has undermined that dominance to some degree through globalisation at the economic and cultural level; yet the nation state remains the focal point of organisation for popular political activity.

So today the focus of all socialist and progressive activity in Britain is national. No significant political movement in Britain has its HQ outside the UK. British political organisations may affiliate to pan-European organisations, but the key unit of organisation remains national. In contrast, even if they have a national base, many corporations are international in their scope, while the left, trade unions and left-leaning political parties are stubbornly national. The asymmetry of this situation is noteworthy.

So long as pan-European political identity remains non-existent, and while the nation state remains the key unit of legal, political and financial power (even more so since the financial crisis of 2008), there is no option other than social struggle at the national state level. That much is clear. But the way out of the stranglehold of exclusive national identity can only be through downsizing national identification to bring it into balance with other identities: municipal, regional, European, international. To do that requires the acceptance of universal values plus opening up means of international communication.

Britain in and after crisis

The crisis of 2008 and its aftermath did nothing to cause capitalism to either weaken or to accommodate the needs of ordinary working people. [written September 2014]

In the period following the financial ruptures in the autumn of 2008, there has been a tendency among some on the left to talk, yet again, about a “crisis of capitalism.” If such talk is not to be dismissed as pure rhetoric, then we must examine whether we are indeed living, or have lived, in a period of crisis and whether any good can come out of it.

So what is a crisis? A crisis in a politico-economic system occurs when the practices, behaviour and structures that have allowed the system to reproduce itself hitherto are no longer comfortably able to do so. Crises may eventually resolve themselves in the restoration of the current system, or they may lead to the breakdown of the existing system and the establishment of a new state of affairs.

In the autumn of 2008 the market fundamentalist form of capitalism suffered a major ideological setback - we might even say crisis - when the banks could only be saved from meltdown by state intervention. Gone in a matter of a few days was the ruling ideological axiom of market fundamentalism, dominant for a generation, that the economy functioned best with only a night watchman state enforcing contracts, but otherwise allowing full rein to the market. The state came out of the shadows to save capitalism and received a new lease of life.

The convulsion was not just ideological. The Blair boom of the mid-2000s was fuelled by an accumulation of private and public and debt. The impossibility of the continued financing of private consumption and public expenditure through borrowing led to falling living standards, unemployment, cuts in social welfare and widespread disenchantment. Most heavily hit were the poorest and the young.

Yet, perhaps paradoxically, if we look at the situation in Britain today, capitalism is extremely strong. Never has a lower percentage of national income been allocated in wages and salaries; and the percentage is still falling. And these mega levels of inequality see next to no political threat to their continuation, with the political situation for the left worsening.

The Westminster Labour Party, led by the insipid Ed Miliband, has made no meaningful break with its own past in government 1997-2010, and is ensnared by its own market fundamentalist inheritance. Electoral organisation to the left of Labour is virtually non-existent. Yet, the political right has strengthened in three ways. In the 2010 General Election the Conservative party emerged yet again as the largest party and re-entered government. The Liberal Democrats, who through much of the New Labour years had masqueraded as an alternative centre left party, entered government in coalition with the Tories and demonstrated their commitment to market fundamentalism, anti-working class politics and state authoritarianism. And thirdly, the only new development in English party politics has been the growth in the early 2010s of UKIP, a right-wing xenophobic party.

The 2011 riots aside, popular protest against existing conditions in favour of equality and liberty has so far been the preserve of the educated young, and has taken the form of theatrical demonstrations and occupations of public squares and private offices and shops. The so-called Occupy Movement based its strategy on grabbing media attention through circus-like protest, which often involved the participants engaging in masochistic displays, such as camping in public places in sub-zero temperatures, as if the amount of discomfort they were experiencing equated with their level of political success.

Occupations and demonstrations, particularly those by students, were crushed and contained by a combination of police violence and harsh penalties. Demonstrators faced arbitrary beatings and containment for hours in street holding pens (kettling) and even the slightest misdemeanour, e.g. throwing an empty plastic bottle, landed the culprit in jail for several months. Political activity itself attracts the label of “domestic extremism” and is monitored by intrusive police photographing, internet surveillance and the deployment of police spies in civic organisations. The result is that political protest ends up as a ludic-tragic duel with police that does nothing to engage ordinary working people or build a political movement.

Yet by the mid 2010s even these forms of protest had more or less petered out. At the same time 2014 saw modest levels of growth in the economy as the recession bottomed out - but with wage levels still falling in real terms none of the benefit ends up in the hands ordinary working people. The worst off stave off starvation thanks only to charity food banks.

Socialism and social democracy are disappearing as ideas from popular memory. Three decades ago if you has asked people in Britain the meaning of socialism - or Labour’s then version of social democracy - a majority could have told you, whether they themselves agreed with the aims of the left or not. The idea of organised structural social improvement based on notions of equality was embedded in the populace, and it was a narrative to which even the Tories had to respond. Today, mostly thanks to New Labour, the idea of socialism has vanished from popular consciousness. We cannot move forward to a place when ordinary working people do not know where that place is.

Yes, capitalism has gone through a kind of crisis, but to me, it seems improbable, in the absence of socialist organisation or ideas, that capitalism - or even the market fundamentalist variation of it which has been dominant in the past three decades - will implode in the near future; and even if it did, it seems even less likely that any kind of socialism would emerge from the ruins. How one responds to that situation is a matter of choice. One can join or support the anomic protest movements, go into one of the far-left micro-parties, work with a single-issue campaign, write comments on Facebook, make jokes, or do nothing. We can enjoy with Schadenfreude the current difficulties of capitalism, but to think that those difficulties will deliver socialism - or even a better world is a delusion.

Mechanical responses: Exeter Labour Party

The world may have changed since the 1980s but there is something static and stubborn in the mentality of those leading Exeter Labour Party.

Three decades ago, in the 1980s, when the Thatcher Tory government had begun the process of impoverishing working people, there was, then as now, a “Devon against the Cuts.” Activists back then heard Chester Long, the then leader of Exeter Labour Party, yelling at them that doing anything apart from polite official moaning about the cuts would be merely “tokenism” and “gesture politics.” And today, we hear exactly the same language from the current leaders of Exeter Labour Party. Anything anybody wants the Labour Party to do is dismissed with the same words. These rote phrases of dismissal, first taught to them while junior councillors under the tutelage of Chester Long, are as meaningful as a set chess move played in each game irrespective of the configuration of pieces on the board.

The dinosaurs of Exeter Labour Party would be on stronger ground if they said the following: “We will do what we can within the law inside the council chamber to limit the cuts and their effects. That will amount to very little, but that is all we will do.” Of course that is a pessimistic message, but after the Blair/Brown governments, such a Labour response would be almost revolutionary.

Labour has spent the years since 1994 promoting market fundamentalism, so it is utterly ill-equipped now in the 2010s to be an effective vehicle in opposing public sector cuts under the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition.

Add into that the dinosaurs of Exeter Labour Party, whose political goals do not extend beyond being seat-warmers on the benches of Exeter City Council, and we see just how little one can expect from them – not even token gestures it would seem.

The main job for the left is to mobilise people and fight the attacks on working people. The second task – either from inside the Labour party or out – is to investigate the facts and then show to people the shortcomings of these Labour leaders.

Marxism & Identity Politics

Identity politics sidelines the common interest of those exploited and oppressed by capitalism.

It is a myth to believe that there ever existed in Britain or elsewhere a fully homogeneous working class. The class has always been divided by ethnicity, religion, geographical identity – and, of course, by sex.

The issue at stake, though, is whether you accentuate the diversity (the so-called identity politics) and then base your politics on building a would-be progressive coalition (women, blacks, Muslims, etc), or whether you emphasise the common interest of those exploited and oppressed by capitalism. I believe the latter to be correct.

Two overarching points resulting from Marxism are so obvious and well known to the intellectual left that they are apt to be forgotten! I shall restate them here: (1) capitalism – in the West at least - has led to such an expansion of the productive forces that it is possible for everyone to live free of poverty and economic anguish, but the capitalist system of ownership and income distribution prevents that, and (2) the fruits of wealth, deployed and enjoyed by capital, are the product of the exploitation of working people.

If ordinary people irrespective of ethnicity knew and internalised those points, then capitalism would be over by lunchtime on Tuesday.


.

The two errors of Ultra-Leftism

Marxism is a powerful explanatory tool, but it can be abused by its own supporters.

Classical Marxism teaches us the most important lesson in macro-political analysis, a lesson which can be simply stated through the following chain of argument. The ownership of capital (in production, distribution and exchange) is concentrated in a few hands and is used for private enrichment. Those who own capital (plus those who earn high salaries in the service to capital, e.g. some lawyers, accountants, etc) have a vested class interest in the existing state of political and economic affairs; and, on account of their wealth, capital owners and their supporters are in a powerful position to get what they want, both economically and politically.

The macro-analysis of politics centrally concerns power; and, as argued above, power relations are determined by the operation of capitalism Thus, any serious socialist project must focus on capitalism and its political power system. And it is precisely because New Labour embraces, rather than challenges, that system that we stand opposed to Labour on its left flank.

However, in the history of Marxist socialist politics, there have been two recurring errors, and it worth looking at these. We can call them the two errors of ultra-leftism.

First, ultra-leftists argue that those political issues which do not bear on anti-capitalist struggle are irrelevant. So long as capitalism is in existence, they argue, it makes little difference what kind of political, legal and other institutional arrangements exist. Politics, they say, should only be judged by the revolutionary calculus of how capitalism can be overthrown. In an extreme version of this view, reforms benefiting working people under capitalism can even be seen as counter-productive as they ‘patch up’ the system and delay its overthrow.

Second, ultra-leftists tend to believe that the overthrow of capitalism and the existing state and legal system will, of itself, herald in a better world. To that end, all political action is subordinated to this almost magical act of revolution, thus creating a politics which is irrelevant to the vast majority of people, who see such revolutionary politics as both undesirable and unrealistic. The ‘phoenix out of the ashes’ Marxists of this kind seem to me akin to the prophets of a religious cult in which the “promised land” emerges after a period of maximum suffering.

The philosopher, Karl Popper, undertook the task of ‘strengthening’ Marxian propositions with the purpose of rendering them suitable for refutation. The ultra-leftists seem to be helping him along.

Bonfire of Illusions by Alex Callinicos

In 2008 the world changed both economically and politically.

In the autumn of 2008 Alex Callinicos saw the world going through a major transformation with the three decade long era of neoliberal consensus coming apart. His book is a succinct analysis of, and intervention in, that situation. The book contains two theses (the so-called twin crises) plus a conclusion.

The first thesis, the economic argument, is that 2008 saw not merely an unsolvable rupture in neoliberalism, but the opening up of a fundamental fault-line in capitalism itself. Callinicos sketches the now familiar contours of the crisis: a credit-fuelled boom across the world which came to a sudden halt when the assets constituting bank securities, such as the now infamous sub-prime mortgages, nosedived in value. After the collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank in September 2008, further banking insolvency was prevented only by a wide-ranging nationalisation of losses and the provision of state subsidies to banks, all of which led in turn to burgeoning state deficits, requiring tax rises and government expenditure cuts. These measures, in tandem with diminishing credit to business and consumers have led to sustained recession across the world.

While the features of the immediate financial crisis are well known, Callinicos wishes to stress the crisis of capitalism itself. In short, he argues that the rising organic composition of capital in the last half century has pushed down the average rate of profit. In conjunction with that, he argues that the increase in the power and independence of finance capital has made the world economic system less stable with ever more frequent credit booms and crashes.

Turning to his second thesis, the political argument, the year 2008 also saw a symbolic event which ended the neoliberal “end of history” myth, namely that only those states adopting the Washington consensus could succeed in the modern world. In the summer Russia used its military superiority to reverse and humiliate Georgia’s own military attempt to re-establish rule from Tbilisi in the two breakaway Russian speaking regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Despite Georgia’s sycophantic pro-Americanism, the Bush administration shied away from a confrontation with Russia in the bear’s own backyard. The US might be the most powerful state in the world, but the continuing vitality of authoritarian state capitalism - principally in Russia and China - proved the future not to be entirely American.

The financial implosion of 2008 plus the growing power of states not committed to neoliberalism all signalled the rebirth of the the proactive political state. Neoliberalism had sought a state that would only enforce contracts and suppress militant opponents of capital, but otherwise the market would rule. Yet, in 2008 the capitalist financial system could only be saved by the state, in the US, but particularly in Britain.

The rise in the proactive state in both West and East has proved the weakness of the world’s other form of state formation, the confederal system of the European Union. The financial crisis has shown that it is the state, not pan-European structures, that has the power to decide and intervene; thus the future of Europe will be more determined in Berlin than in Brussels.

For me, the weakest part of the book is the conclusion where Callinicos argues that the solution to the world's woes is the complete abolition of the market in favour of planning directed through workers’ councils, even if he does admit, citing Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, of some gradualism after the working-class has seized political power. In such a slender volume Callinicos does not have the space to back-up his argument and his conclusion appears more like a piece of propaganda. And while I don’t in principle oppose the outcome Callinicos wants, I think his binary choice - crisis capitalism or rule by workers’ councils - simplistic and unrealistic for people today.

That said, I think the book is well worth reading and learning from.

CALLINICOS, Alex, Bonfire of Illusions, Polity Press 2009.


.

Exeter Labour Briefing 1983-84

Exeter Labour Briefing, a magazine published by a group of mainly young people in the mid 1980s, was the first step in a socialist project in the south-west of England.

The evenings were already drawing in when in September 1981 two second-year university students huddled around a cheap radio set in their room in a shared house. Both were anxious to hear the outcome of the first item of business of the Labour Party Conference of that year: namely the election of the deputy leader of the Labour Party. For the first time in Labour Party history, instead of Labour MPs alone electing the leader and deputy, the newly created electoral college, which opened the vote to the constituency parties and trade unions, would decide the outcome. The result was read out by a party official: the right-winger, Denis Healey, had defeated Tony Benn for the position by a whisker of less than one percent of the votes. I felt the pain like a punch in the face.


Joining the Labour Party

I had joined the University Labour Club the year before and found it politically ineffective. Unusually for the early 1980s, the club was led by Labour right-wingers who harboured a bitter knee-jerk dislike of everything vaguely progressive from CND to public ownership. Their idea of student political activity was skittle matches with the Liberals and afternoon tea with the Tories. They, and there were only two or three of them, retained control of the club solely because they were unchallenged. Taking power away from this small clique proved as easy as cutting through warm butter with a knife: four or five of us organised a motion of no-confidence; they were out; and we were in. I became the club secretary.

Student politics itself was of little interest to me. However that did not mean students were of no importance: they could become political activists and articulate socialist ideas both among and outside the student body. In the autumn of 1981, the target of my interest became the Labour Party itself. Inside the University Labour Club little was known about its politics, though we knew the Exeter Party had supported Benn against Healey in the deputy leadership contest.

Joining the Party proved technically more difficult than I had imagined. From a leaflet I found the address of the HQ and went off in search of 26 Clifton Hill. Unfortunately, there was also a Clifton Road nearby to distract me and number 26 turned out to be an ordinary terraced house. In the end I wrote a letter to the address on the leaflet, and a month or so later the membership secretary of the Pennsylvania/St. Davids branch turned up at my student house. After a further wait while my membership was approved by the branch and the Exeter GMC (General Management Committee) I was given my first party card which in those days still carried a red flag rather than a red rose.

The university itself, plus much of the student and staff residential quarter of Exeter, was in the Pennsylvania/St. Davids ward of the town. For this reason the branch was one of the largest and most vocal in Exeter, although its Labour vote was amongst the lowest. The SDP faction had already left, and the branch, consisting disproportionally of university employees, was in the process of moving its meetings from the houses of a clique of middle class party members to the party headquarters in Clifton Hill. The view of the leadership of the branch was clear: the movement to the left in the past had been justified, but now it was time to stabilise and if necessary move to the right tactically, if not in principle.

My second or third branch meeting was held in the faded grandeur of the Mardon Hall of residence at the university. It was here that I made my first intervention in Labour Party politics. I agreed to second a motion calling for Labour, in the event of no party having overall control in the May 1984 municipal elections, not to form a coalition with the Liberals. The right-wing moved a successful amendment to replace the words “will not form a coalition” with “has no intention of...” And of course when the council was hung, they did indeed form not a coalition but a working arrangement with the Liberals.

As a Labour Party member, I was now able to occupy one of the two places on the GMC allotted to the University Labour Club; hitherto these seats had gone unfilled. Strangely, I had entertained the idea that the members of the GMC would sit around a table, debate matters of political importance and listen to one another. I expected local and administrative matters to be discussed, but that these issues would be tied into national political narratives. I was in for a shock: delegates sat slumped around the inside of a Nissan hut, several the worse for drink. The meeting consisted mainly of endless unstructured and often incoherent reports of what had been said at city and county council meetings and what had been going on in the branches and in the executive committee. Exchanges between delegates were mindlessly aggressive, particularly so given that it was often hard to discern any coherent political differences between the speakers. Within minutes of watching this shambles I saw the limitations of trying to promote left-wing politics there and of course I largely lost respect for Exeter Labour Party as an institution.

Nonetheless this configuration of people and of attitudes was the reality of the Labour Party in Exeter, and I was there to learn how it worked. Though there were a number of miscellaneous characters and people who straddled both sides in their sympathies, it was not hard to discern two factions. One was what we would refer to today as ‘old Labour;’ local working-class people, often connected to the trains and buses, for whom the Labour Party meant advancing the well-being and status of just that group. And second, middle class people, usually connected to education and the public sector, who were either associated with various causes (e.g. nuclear disarmament) or just saw themselves as charity workers for the less well-off. The number of people who could be classified as left-wing socialists could be counted on the fingers of one hand.


My political thinking in the early 1980s

I should now pause and sketch in the political analysis which I held in the early 1980s, which then seemed reasonable, but was later shown by events to be in part mistaken. Like everybody else at the time, and rightly so, I saw the coming into office of Margaret Thatcher’s Tory Party in 1979 as marking a profound shift in the direction of British society. Thatcherism, heralding in an age of market fundamentalism and re-consolidation of capitalist power, signalled the end of the years of political consensus which had prevailed in Britain since the Second World War. Monetarist policies, cuts in public expenditure, attacks on the trade unions and local councils were leading to increasing social inequality, poverty, mass unemployment and a sharpening of class conflict.

I was mistaken in believing that two, and only two, alternatives lay ahead. One possibility was that the socio-economic conditions of the early eighties would be a permanent fixture of British society, with ever increasing class and political polarisation. Or, in the alternative, the Labour Party would change itself into an instrument of socialist transformation, win office and then in a mass popular struggle abolish capitalism. Obviously, I hoped for the latter over the former and wanted to be part of the new socialist politics. But if recession Thatcherism were to be a permanent feature of life, then I would play my part in working class politics and the counter culture of the age. It never occurred to me at the time that an upswing in capitalism was possible, and that neo-liberal capitalist development would transform the working class and then propel Labour Party politics away from socialism.

The consequence of holding these views was that I regarded the majority of the existing currents of opinion in the Labour Party as irrelevant anachronisms and impediments to progress. The working-class trade union Labourites, symbolised in Exeter by Chester Long leader of railwayman’s trade union, harked back to an era when the working man was treated with privileged indulgence. Market fundamentalism and political Thatcherism would throw him and his ilk off their high horses as indeed they actually did. Equally irrelevant in this period of intensified class struggle were the middle-class social ameliorators who saw Labour as a polite pressure group for good causes. That was how I saw things at the time; and being in possession of this analysis, of course, led to the inevitability of conflict within Exeter Labour Party. And being twenty years old I was not prepared to soft peddle.


The birth of Exeter Labour Briefing

The origin of Exeter Labour Briefing came out of a very simple event which proved to me that the struggle within the Labour Party had to conducted at least in part outside its official organs. The new chairman of the branch was an affable politics lecturer from the right of the party who was regarded as somewhat politically naive. His proposal on taking the chair was the establishment of a branch newsletter, a suggestion which was unanimously adopted. Without any complaint form him, I put in a small piece arguing that the party should move leftwards. What I hadn’t predicted was the censorious reaction.

Freedom of debate was not appreciated. The reaction against my piece at the next branch meeting threw up two pseudo-arguments which would be repeated again and again by Exeter Labour Party throughout the whole Briefing saga: first, that people, in this case party members, might confuse my arguments for Labour Party policy; and second, that the existence of differences of opinion would divide and confuse. Since restrictive and illiberal policies such as this made any internal opposition in the Exeter Labour Party impossible, the only option was to establish a journal outside the Party structures. That this journal would run into problems with the Exeter Labour Party leadership was of course inevitable, however much some of the founders of Briefing wanted to avoid this outcome. Yet, the situation in Exeter was a strange one. Admittedly, throughout Britain in 1982-83 the march to the left was being halted and made to retreat, but publication bans on party members, particularly when the people involved were unassociated with Trotskyist groups, was rare, if not unknown.

In the early summer of 1983 my last university examination was behind me and I was a free man with time on my hands. In July the first issue of Exeter Labour Briefing appeared. Initially we were four: myself, a university friend, the membership secretary from our local Labour Party branch who worked as software developer and finally a teacher from the technical college. Within a few months, the other three had left Exeter, but it is worthwhile looking at the politics behind the first issue which appeared in July 1983.

Several issues had to be sorted out early on. First, it was decided that we were setting up, not a political faction, but a discussion magazine for which any Labour Party member could write. In practice, that meant little: we didn’t expect contributions from our opponents and the distinction between acting as a faction and as producers of a publication was more theoretical than real. The second issue was the name. We adopted the name Labour Briefing, not because we had any connection with the London magazine of that name, but because we wanted to talk to the Labour Party from inside the Labour Party. Later we developed a partnership with London Labour Briefing, but it was never a relationship of dependency. Thirdly, and this was the most hotly disputed issue, we had to decide whether to sell the magazine to the public or somehow restrict it to party members. The first issue published in July 1983 was theoretically limited to party members only, but later this rather limiting and unrealistic policy was abandoned.


Managing Exeter Labour Briefing on Welfare

My personal situation changed in the summer of 1983. In September, no longer a student, I moved into a bedsit and the main source of my income became welfare benefits. The outlook for Briefing appeared grim as my three associates left Exeter one by one. Yet two sources of recruitment remained. The first was the University Labour Club now under the control of three left-wing mature postgraduate students who played some role themselves, but also encouraged Club members to involve themselves in Briefing. The second was the the pool of unemployed university leavers who remained in Exeter with time on their hands. Most were angry that recession Thatcherism had robbed them of an opportunity to work and loathed the narrow-mindedness and cultural debasement of Tebbit-ridden Toryism. The Thatcher regime was only four years old and they did not believe it would entrench itself for a generation. Instead, they believed something more radical and principled than the Labour Party establishment of Denis Healey was both necessary and possible. Briefing was something local and practical to give expression to those feelings.

One immediate need of every political project then as now was funding. In those pre-internet days, it was not even possible to publish anything without access to funds for typewriters, typewriter cartridges and print shops. All required money as did the hire of rooms, usually above pubs, to hold meetings. Smaller meetings among comrades who were friends could be accommodated in bedsits.

As nobody was going to fund us, we had little choice but to finance the project ourselves. And given that nearly everyone lived from dole money or on a student grant, the task was not easy. I purchased a small brown paper cash book, which soon became known as the "shit-coloured book," and gave everyone a page. It was basically a means of taxation: each Briefing supporter was given a weekly sum based on his or her income, ranging from some thirty pence to two pounds. Throughout the week I did the rounds to bring in the money and deposited it in our account at the Cooperative Bank on the High Street.

Initially I had thought that my taxation rounds would prove unpopular, but the opposite turned out to be the case. The politically induced recession of the early eighties hadn’t just cut through England’s manufacturing north, but had also sharply diminished the number of graduate employment opportunities across the land. There was thus an inflated pool of discontented educated youth who were either unemployed or on the verge of it. Market fundamentalism as an ideology was far from entrenched and many believed in the possibility of change. Briefing, based on the educated young, had a strong minority appeal, and more people than I had thought possible wanted to discuss politics with me and hand over small quantities of money.

The biggest difficulty was not tapping into the pool of support but activating it into participation in Exeter Labour Party. The whole ambiance of the Labour Party in Exeter was undoubtedly depressing and made worse by the barrage of insults that met the young who did participate. Among the most vindictive was that coined, or at least most often deployed, by the Exeter party’s only employee, Dorothy Parker, that “these are just transitory people” - with the implication that the young and unemployed constituted some sort of Untermensch. The reaction tended to produce one of two responses: the young person wanted nothing further to do with Exeter Labour Party - and many in the party were happy with that result. Or a relationship of hate developed and he or she threw everything into Briefing. That latter reaction was the basis of our strength.

Poverty of itself does not produce virtue; and only discipline and a sense of purpose can overcome the debilitating effects of the cold in winter, poor diet and exclusion from much of normal life. Why I was motivated enough to put in fourteen-hour days to what amounted to voluntary work remains a mystery to me even a quarter of a century later. At around ten my typical day started with a journey to Exeter University Library. Though I was no longer a student, I had no practical difficulty in getting in and was able to continue my studies in academic Marxism and much else in peace. In the late afternoon I visited comrades around the town raising funds, collecting articles and selling the publication; and most evenings there were meetings: of the Labour Party, Briefing itself or of associated groups, e.g. CND. For some reason the massive job of assembling Briefing for the press was always done through the night.

My own control of my limited money was crucial to my survival. My normal social security income was some twenty-seven pounds a week. I budgeted for two pounds a day with nearly all of that being spent on food, mostly vegetables and bread - and on those days when I had the money, a small piece of cheese and a chocolate bar. I spent nothing on heating or travel: I walked or hitched. Curiously enough I never bought second-hand clothes, so they were either in tatters or very occasionally new. The remainder was spent on political activity or saved.

Among us there was a camaraderie, mostly male, but not exclusively so. The women were either in relationships or more often were the partners of male activists. One girl, though, remained singularly aloof from the crowd. When and how she joined Briefing now escapes my memory. She lived alone in the most spartan of bedsits; her bed, covered with rags, took up most of the tiny room and on a small scratched and stained chest-of-drawers was some bread and a piece of cheese. She was different from the rest of us: she had been privately educated and was only eighteen years old. Seen as taciturn and as hard as nails, she fitted in with difficulty; and were I not entrusted with collecting her subs, I too might have passed her by. Yet sitting next to her that day on her bed, for there were no chairs in the room, I sensed that behind her intense penetrating green eyes, a gentleness.

A clear choice faced me: either try to learn something about her or else take the money and simply leave. I chose to listen to her and slowly she opened up. She had found the company of her overbearing mother intolerable and had chosen instead the poverty of bedsit land. Entitled to next to nothing on social welfare, she lived a hand-to-mouth existence utterly and completely alone. I too was alone. My arms went round her thin body and I kissed her. Her eyes continued to stare unmoved with a depth of pain that I could not reach. We moved apart and continued to talk, cordially and even in friendship, but with no intimacy.


Opinions within Exeter Labour Briefing

Briefing was never a monolithic body of people. Differences ran through the group: militant reformism commanded a majority, but there were attachments to other sets of ideas too. I will consider the three most important here: radical feminism, Trotskyism and anarchism.

Briefing had been set up by men, and it was unlikely in that age and in that milieu that women would have started the project. Nonetheless a significant minority of Briefing supporters were female, though they were never numerous enough to take control of the Exeter Labour Party’s women’s council even when it lay there for the taking. Most of the female supporters described themselves as feminists and most of the men supported them in most of their demands. Yet there was a clear dividing line between what can be defined as socialist feminism and fundamentalist feminism. The former focused on those processes in society, the Labour party and Briefing itself which discriminated against women. So in the spirit of the time, language was changed so as not to carry sexist connotations, thus the chairman was always a chairperson. Positive discrimination to boost the representation of women in leading positions was also supported; and the principle of the separate organisation of women, in addition to their general participation, was also endorsed. For the early 1980s Briefing was undoubtedly more progressive on feminist issues than the Exeter Labour Party, a situation which was unanimously applauded within the Briefing group.

A minority though was influenced by a fundamentalist feminism which saw the source of female disadvantage not in society in the fist instance, but in the sexuality of men. Male sexuality, the act of penetration in particular, was responsible for creating patriarchal power structures, detrimental to the interests of women. At its most extreme the organised political meeting and reasoned argument were seen as patriarchal inventions which should be abolished. This kind of dysfunctional political nihilism had much in common with the anarchism which I discuss below.

Trotskyism, curiously enough, did not impinge much on Briefing. In its manifestation in 1980s Britain, Trotskyism was associated with small groups of people, predominantly male, who shared a political analysis which all members of the group were required to propagate. Though Trotskyist groups differed on whether to participate in the Labour Party, and if they did for what purpose, they all maintained three unshakable positions: first the imposition of political uniformity on their members (democratic centralism); second, that only a disciplined party like themselves could lead the working class to socialism; and third, that the transition to socialism would require the forceful overthrow of the existing regime in Britain. These almost apocalyptic and religious-like views made them incomprehensible to most inside Exeter Labour Party, making them an exotic irrelevance.

Two Trotskyite groups had a marginal influence in Exeter. Inside the Labour party there were a handful of Militant Tendency supporters who might well have been the target for disciplinary action, had it not been for the presence of Briefing. We had very little dealings with this moronic collection of people, except in the sense that from time to time we found ourselves voting the same way. A branch of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party also existed in Exeter; for the most part they were concerned with their own internal debates, though later several of the activists in the WRP joined the Briefing group, but not the Labour Party. Trotskyism at best provided people with whom we could discuss politics and were important in that sense; or at worst they were irrelevant to everything that Briefing was doing.

At least Trotskyism, even if its adepts worked towards a totally unrealistic political agenda, could, in so far as they were involved the Labour Party, work to bolster the position of the left. That could not be said of the anarchist contingent who saw politics entirely differently. The guiding thread of many anarchists in Exeter was that the correct response to recession Thatcherism was to undermine, and if possible destroy, all political organisations by actions which were often illegal and usually anti-social. The only freedom worth having in their view was within a space created outside the law and routines of established society; decisions inside this disorderly collection of people were theoretically made by consensus in informal structures, but were in fact the dictats of a few charismatic and seemingly mentally ill people.

As a serious political programme ideas of this kind were an utter nonsense. However more than radical feminism or Trotskyism, anarchist sentiments were problematic for Briefing for two reasons. First a few of Exeter’s anarchists involved themselves in the Labour Party for a short while, but far more dangerously many anarchist ideas had a resonance inside the Briefing group among otherwise intelligent people.

Briefing’s association with anarchism acquired farcical dimensions in the so-called ceremonial chair incident. An ornate wooden ceremonial chair (The Freddie Tarr chair) adorned the main committee room at Clifton Hill and its allusion to authority had angered some of the Young Socialists who met once a month in the room. We were one of the few branches of the Young Socialists in those years not controlled by the Trotskyite Militant Tendency. The branch supported Briefing and sent two Briefing supporters to the GMC; I was chairman of Young Socialists but avoided sitting in the ceremonial chair.

After one meeting I was asked by a couple of people on the periphery of Briefing for the key to room as, they claimed, a pullover had been left in the room. Only after the key had been handed back did I realise something didn’t ring true. On returning to the meeting room I discovered that the chair had been removed.

My first thought was to separate myself and Briefing people from this incident. Quite obviously an expulsion from the party based on theft of party property would rest on sound ground; and indeed getting us expelled was precisely what the anarchists wished to bring about. I immediately reported the incident to the party leadership, who in turn notified the police. Although I refused to answer any police questions, I was nonetheless branded by the anarchists, and to some extent by the their sympathisers inside the Briefing group, as a police informer and scab. Though these attacks left me somewhat vulnerable for a while, in the end result was positive as clear water was created between us and the anarchist contingent.

Matters took an even more absurd development as it then turned out that the whole theft had been witnessed by a right-wing member of the General Management Committee. Immediately opposite the Labour Party headquarters in Clifton Hill was a town park. Unknown to me the park was a meeting place for gay men, and apparently this party member had been in a bush when the chair was unceremoniously dragged into the park before being taken away in a van. What actually happened to the chair is not clear; several anecdotal accounts speak of it being religiously burnt by the anarchist fraternity.

The incident ended with me being summoned to the Executive Committee, but on this occasion I was on the leadership’s side. Strangely, the committee members did not see the theft of the chair as seriously as I did. In my petty-bourgeois thinking the mindless theft and destruction of the property of another was an unforgivable sin, even if it belonged to Exeter Labour Party. For many on the executive it was a piece of horseplay. Perhaps they hated me so much that they even started to identify with the anarchists.


Avoiding violence

It is a tribute to both both Briefing and Exeter Labour Party that in the whole conflict not a single punch was ever thrown. Yet the hatred was such that violence always lay suppressed just below the surface. One associate of Briefing, who involved himself in the group but not in the Exeter Party on the grounds that he was active in another constituency Labour Party, once approached me with a novel proposition. He offered, if I thought it helpful, to put one particular member of the Exeter Labour Party in hospital for a while. He was not joking because I had witnessed his tactics being used elsewhere and I hated them, not just on the grounds of a moral prohibition against initiating violence, but in a belief that the end doesn’t so much justify the means, rather the end becomes contaminated by a rotten means. Declining his offer was not so much a self-sacrifice, but done in recognition that, even if I had supported violence, I could never have carried a majority of Briefing with me. Had our opponents ever used violence against us, no doubt the situation would have changed, but fortunately they never did.

The open structure of Briefing meant that these different strands of opinion discussed above could easily be accommodated. I never even thought of censoring different views but supported their articulation into articles in Briefing. In any event we could always out-write them. Typing and compiling Briefing was hard work and it tended to fall to me and a couple of other people to do the work. Most Briefing meetings were discussion groups which aired views but did not have to reach decisions. The only Briefing meetings which did have to come to clear conclusions were the pre-meeting meetings. These need explaining.


Working inside Exeter Labour Party

Soon after Briefing grew from a couple of people, it became obvious that some form of Briefing pre-meeting was required before branch and GMC meetings. Many Briefing supporters were young and politically inexperienced, so the bullying and bureaucratic procedures of the Labour Party were baffling and intimidating. Several functions were served by meeting up in a pub beforehand. We could discuss the issues and structure of the meeting on our own first, so people didn’t go in blind. We could check that everybody was there; a pre-meeting drink was quite an incentive to turn up. Also we could distribute our interventions in the meeting between us. As there were always some neutrals in meeting, we found it helpful not to be so obviously functioning as a group because individual arguments, rather than group chorus, were more effective in bringing neutrals over to our point of view.

As an organised force Briefing hit raw nerves in Exeter Labour Party and violated their comfort zones. Anger against us intensified as time went on. The intention of the right-wing was simple stop Briefing from publishing and/or rid the party of these irritating new young activists. In the early summer of 1984 the GMC asked the Executive to investigate Briefing and I and a third year university student were ‘summoned’ to the Executive Committee. Ours were two of the named editors of the magazine; the others had already left Exeter. The main accusation against us was that Exeter Labour Briefing could be confused as a Labour Party publication.

The official charge against us was plain silly. But when an organisation has insisted on an ‘official truth,’ the more absurd the belief, the more it is clung to. The truth was that not even a moron in hurry could have muddled Exeter Labour Briefing with an official Labour Party publication; it carried no Labour Party emblem and it spoke to not for the Labour Party. Yet, this absurd accusation also provided an escape route for us if we wanted it: if the name were changed, then the leadership of Exeter Labour Party would surely have no objection to it. And that was precisely what happened: we changed the name to Devon Labour Briefing.

The compromise of changing the name divided the leadership of Exeter Labour Party. One group led by Chester Long shouted loudly that the name was the never the issue, but it had only been adopted as a stick to beat us with. He wanted to proceed with expulsion whether we changed the name or not. A majority, though, were unhappy to take the heavy step of expulsion and saw the expulsion threat as an attempt to silence us, not take away our party cards. Long’s hand was also weakened by something else. While the issue was dragging on, Tony Benn from the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party had written to the leaders in Exeter stating with certainty that in his opinion were Exeter to proceed with an expulsion the national party would overturn it. And indeed in 1984 they would have done.

Changing the name also divided Briefing. Some argued, wrongly as it turned out, that defusing the conflict by changing the name would bring on board much of the supposed centre ground of the party. Others, including myself, felt we would avoid expulsion even if we kept the same name and if the dispute went up to London our profile would be enhanced. At the end of a packed sardine-can bedsit meeting, two decisions were made. One was to change the name of the publication to Devon Labour Briefing. The other was an obscure issue: to change the editorial from issue to issue rather than repeatedly reprinting the same political statement. On both issues I was part of the minority.

On that note Exeter Labour Briefing came to an end in the summer of 1984, merely a year after its launch. Altogether, it produced a mere five cheaply printed issues, but brought into existence a movement of people in one town in the south-west of England. Within the decade, Briefing in Exeter would fail and disappear, but first reincarnated as Devon Labour Briefing it would experience expansion beyond students and the young unemployed. It would contain more pages, involve more activists and have more money; two more expulsion attempts would be launched against its editors and writers. Yet the core of its political analysis would remain fundamentally unchanged as it first expanded and then fell apart.


.

The Internet: Influence and Limitations

The internet a massive resource with attendant dangers

The internet has brought about the single biggest expansion in freedom of communication in the age of market fundamentalism. This is exceptional because in the last three decades nearly every other indicator of social progress has gone into reverse: the size and influence of civic organisations, moves to advance social equality and security, traditional civic freedoms, etc.

Of course the internet has facilitated not just left-wing political communication, but also other hitherto restricted topics of communication, particularly minority sexual interests. The main channels of internet communication are email messages, discussion boards and internet sites. The ability to find information has multiplied a thousand-fold.

Some people say that the internet is the cause of a decline in face-to-face political contacts. I don’t think so. Rare is the socialist who prefers writing facebook messages to having the discussion face-to-face. The fact is the internet substitutes when face-to-face contact is impossible, as letters and telephone calls did in an earlier age.

For me the three main dangers of politics on the internet are these:

First, the internet not only allows political communication widely and relatively freely but also facilitates near total state surveillance of the correspondence of activists. Yet in the liberal democracies if one is already known as a left-wing activist, this hardly makes a difference.

Second, there is always the danger of the internet being made unavailable in whole or in part, as the recent attempted suppression of FitWatch and WikiLeaks has shown. Common sense dictates that people should prepare for that eventuality, though I doubt whether many people actually do that.

Third, there is something more subtle and insidious. When we communicated more in printed articles, reading a five thousand word article was a normal occurrence. Who does that easily or willingly on the net? We have become accustomed to reading no more than a few hundred words in an on-line post or article, before clicking and moving on. That attention-span deficiency has affected the whole way in which we acquire and structure information.


.

The Fortnum and Mason Affair

The British state is doing all it can to shut down the popular UNCUT movement

Uncut is a grass roots activist organisation, consisting mainly of the educated young. The movement is opposed to tax avoidance by retailers and other companies, particularly at a time when sadistic spending cuts are being inflicted on the services required by ordinary working people. Uncut tactics involve non-violent direct action without vandalism, typically noisy sit-down protests in the department stores owned by tax avoiding companies.

On 26 March 2011, in an action separate from the TUC sponsored demonstration, Uncut staged a sitdown protest in London’s upmarket Fortnum and Mason department store. The facts of what happened are not disputed.

The police arrived and informed the protesters that they could leave unmolested. Once outside every protester – in excess of one hundred persons – was arrested. The young people were distributed to police stations around London and held overnight. Their mobile phones and clothes were confiscated and they were charged with the offence of aggravated trespass and banned from entering the centre of London. Charges of criminal damage were imposed and then, at least for most of them, dropped. Whether they are later found guilty of a criminal offence or not, their names will entered on the police lists of "domestic extremists" for life.

The decision to make a mass arrest and then detain Uncut activists overnight – a wholly disproportionate action given the minor nature of the offence - was a political one. By contrast, far fewer anarchist vandals were arrested. Quite clearly, the police wished to intimidate young people from engaging in effective peaceful protest against tax avoidance, rather than arrest anarchists engaged in property damage.

In their propaganda after the event the government and police sought to associate the Uncut activists with anarchist hooliganism and violence. Yet among the left and the informed, nobody believes that. The barefaced lying by the police to the activists has also further undermined the credibility of the police both in the eyes of Uncut and the public.

Uncut alone is no substitute for organised political opposition, but in terms of raising consciousness and involving people in constructive protest action, there is nothing better in Britain today. Socialists should support it with their voices, money and bodies.

Note

Two views are circulating on the internet about the police prioritising Uncut and not the Black Bloc anarchists in the London protests of 26 March 2011.

One view holds that the police targeted the peaceful Uncut activists out of frustration because they were unable to arrest the anarchists. The other view maintains that the anarchists, who are at least in part infiltrated by police agents, were not stopped in their street rampage in order to bolster public support for harder policing. The arrest of the Uncut activists was then undertaken to associate them in the public mind with the anarchists.

I do not know which view is correct. However whichever alternative is the case, the police are shown to be acting improperly.

TUC demonstration: Saturday 26 March 2011

On Saturday 26 March 2011 there will a TUC organised march through London to protest against the cuts in public services which are promoted by the coalition government.

The immediate aims of the demonstration are twofold. First, a large demonstration will send a message to the government, indicating the level of organised opposition to Tory/Lib Dem policy. This pressure will hopefully push the government into mitigating the effects of some of the measures. Second, the protest will provide an opportunity for ordinary working people to organise and through their organisation become stronger and more confident in their opposition to the government.

One issue of contention is the high level of TUC cooperation with the police, perhaps even to extent that the police are organising the march with the TUC as a junior partner. The merits of this are unclear. On the one hand, cooperation with the police may prevent the demonstration descending into mayhem. Chaos and widescale damage do little to advance the arguments of the left; and the acrimony resulting from such an outcome would deepen rifts in the left.

Yet full compliance with the police also carries dangers. There can be little doubt that the default position of the police is to oppose the demonstrators and to perceive themselves as serving the will of government, corporate power and authority. To that extent, everything that they do will be to frustrate and mitigate the purposes of the demonstrators. FIT officers will be collecting data on everyone, and the stage will be set for even more repressive policing in the future.

That be as it may, the main point is to have a large and successful demonstration on Saturday.

Police and anarchist strategy

The police do indeed face a dilemma with this march.

In the case of the student demonstrators the main aim of policing was to kettle and beat protesters with the purpose of intimidating people against protesting.

This cannot be the strategy tomorrow. The police will wish to keep their legitimacy in the eyes of the many ordinary trade unionists and working people, who will be demonstrating. Therefore, they will go to some lengths to avoid heavy repressive policing.

One strategy of the anarchists will be to provoke the police into heavy-handed behaviour with the very purpose of discrediting them. I think this strategy is mistaken: first because it will fail, and second because, in so far as it is successful, it will only deter ordinary people from taking to the streets in the future.

Why are the middle-aged middle class so apathetic in the crisis?

The Cameron Government is pursuing an economic policy which will impoverish and wreck the lives of huge numbers of people. The pain is every bit as bad as that inflicted by the Thatcher governments in the 1980s. But contrasting now with then reveals two political differences.

First, the Cameron-led coalition of millionaires has avoided the public gloating sadism associated with men like Norman Tebbit, who were so prominent under Thatcher. While “Tebbitism” no doubt appealed to the ranks of Daily Mail readers (then and now), opposing his brand of narrow-mindedness and authoritarianism united the left at a cultural level in the 1980s.

Second, in the 1980s – even as it moved to the right – the Labour Party provided a rallying point through its propagation of a social democratic alternative for Britain. Today the Labour Party is hogtied in its opposition, for on nearly every issue from rampant inequality to tuition fees, the coalition government is proceeding further along a track previous trodden by New Labour.

Yet the middle-aged middle class left which was so anti-Thatcher two decades ago has not just lost a discernable enemy icon and a friend in the Labour Party, it has also been hobbled by its own experience. Let me explain how.

In the 1970s and early 1980s the educated young reacted in horror at the demise of the achievements of the Post War consensus. As politics polarised, much of the educated young attached itself to the left with more ardour than did those in their adulthood in the 1960s. Yet history played a trick. Although the young middle-class left lost politically, at the person level it prospered – and this bred in many a political cynicism and disengagement from politics. That cynicism was fed further as the generation passively witnessed the immorality and betrayals of New Labour; so when the economic turn came at the end of the 2000s, it could respond with nothing but sarcasm and jokes.

One can just hope that the younger generation can do better.

The social democratic test for Ed Miliband

There is a lot of piffle being written in the press about Ed Miliband.

One central question confronts socialists: would a Miliband Labour government elected in 2015 bring about a meaningful shift in wealth and income in favour of ordinary working people AND (not or) expand democracy, along with greater civic and personal freedoms.

If you believe the answer is yes, then we should join him in the Labour Party and help strengthen that agenda. If you think, on the contrary, that the main role of Labour in government would be to further entrench the power of capital in Britain, then we need to build an alternative movement for socialism, however hard that task may be.

social class: a reality

Walter argues that class politics is now outdated, and if we are to build a coalition for socialism it has based on something else. As evidence he points to the decline, especially outside the state sector, of trade union affiliation.

I don’t think this argument is wholly correct. It is certainly true that levels of political class consciousness have declined, but does that mean class itself is less of a social reality so socialists should ignore it? I think not.

Social class is a concomitant of the relations of production under capitalism. Economic and political structures affect classes in such a way as to bring about a variety of class divisions based primarily on income and wealth, but also on ethnic group, status, education, etc.

In the last three decades Thatcherism and then New Labour have overseen an increase in social inequalities of income and wealth so that Britain is now more unequal than at any time since the Second World War. In parallel social mobility (inter and intra-generational) has declined. It is thus wide of the mark to talk about the disappearance of social class; and if social classes are a reality they cannot be ignored in politics.

As of old, it remains the job of socialists to convince working people, as working people, of the injustices of the capitalist order so that they can become instruments of progressive social change