Left Unity can build an alternative to Labour

Dave Kellaway

Andrew Murray, a leading advisor to Len McCluskey (Unite general secretary) and a Morning Star supporter, has published a twenty page article in this year’s Socialist Register criticising the choice we have made in developing the Left Unity  project, as a political alternative to the Labour Party (LP).

Murray spoke at the recent Historical Materialism conference on the same theme, and with the same vehemence against groups like Socialist Resistance who are involved. In May the Left Unity website published a similar article written by Michael Ford which was pseudonym used by Murray – the reason being, he said, “to avoid the union, Unite, which I serve as Chief of Staff, being dragged into any public controversy on the issue at the time”.

If we are to build a broad left party then we must debate with currents who still believe we may be able to reclaim (or split) Labour for the left through working with his union, Unite, the GMB and others alongside campaigns like the People’s Assembly. For him projecting political and organisational alternatives today is a waste of effort and doomed to failure. Although I think he exaggerates their strength – particularly in organised terms – many activists in the unions and Labour party still support his position. We need to work alongside them in common action while patiently discussing with them how to build a political alternative to Miliband.

What we can agree on

Let’s start by listing where there is some agreement between Murray and LU supporters:

Murray is honest enough to recognise that historically his line has not been very successful. Older comrades may remember the way in which the Communist Party line of the British Road to Socialism…has led in 2013 to this party been smaller than the revolutionary left forces. Nevertheless we can agree with Murray that the record of the radical left outside Labour has not been glorious either. This is precisely why we are trying to do something with LU which is different to Respect, the Socialist Labour Party, the Socialist Alliance or the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. But Murray just lumps us all into the same bag. Indeed his polemic also targets groups like the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party despite the fact that neither of them support LU. Some of Murray’s critique of these groups’ political approach is shared by supporters of LU.

We do not agree with his underestimation of the space that has opened up to the left of the LP but I think most of us accept his point that this space does not automatically produce a left current just by existing. Exploiting that space means astute political intervention and the existence of struggles and campaigns that in practice challenge Miliband’s social liberalism. I think Left Unity supporters agree with him about the importance of rebuilding trade unionism and recognising the social weight and protagonist role of the working class in any anti-capitalist transformation. Unfortunately his article repeatedly and dishonestly reduces LU to an electoral force and disregards the engagement of LU members in their trade unions and mass campaigns.

We also agree that major splits in the mass organisations will be likely if we are to build an effective anti-capitalist party in this country. LU will not be turning away from these bodies in some sort of splendid isolation. Building a political alternative now and not solely waiting on unions, campaigns or events to produce these splits will potentially improve the basis for bringing them about. Syriza’s record in Greece has certainly shown this, but Andrew ridicules electoral scores of 5% – which was the vote Syriza was getting a few years ago.

I think there is no disagreement with the importance of the People’s Assembly and its contribution to developing an alternative to Miliband’s social liberalism. The latest version of Murray’s article gives more space to this development, but again he seems to think that you cannot build LU as a political alternative and at the same time be the best builders of a broader united front campaign. Andrew knows that LU supporters are in the collective leadership at both the national and local level of this campaign.

I also think we share much of his analysis of the defensive nature of the period, the effect of accumulated defeats and the need to rebuild basic working class organisation and resistance. Unite has worked positively in many areas and is growing but Grangemouth also shows the limits of this progress.

Now let us deal with the six key arguments that form his case against Left Unity:

1) “it [Left Unity] is based on a flawed assessment of how worthwhile socialist parties can be created”

His model is rather mechanical. The mass organisations will eventually split under the pressure of struggles or political events. If there is a left current, one that is not projecting a direct political alternative either within unions or openly against the Labour Party but is well embedded in the mass organisations and campaigns, then you can create a mass socialist party when conditions are right.

There is no blueprint today for how socialist political parties can emerge. Stalinist ‘socialism’ repels working people, nor are we in the 1890s where the trade unions and basic organisations of the class were rising. Any new socialist party will emerge from people coming out of social democratic, Stalinist, Eurocommunist and Trotskyist traditions or with entirely new experiences which may be feminist or ecological more than socialist. Indeed the limited experiences of the LU local groups confirm that sort of mix.

Murray appears to dream of another starting point that will result from successful united front struggles over a long period which will finally pull the new party rabbit out of the hat at the last minute. He also tends to ignore the new ways people have become radicalised – the experience of Occupy, UK Uncut, feminism, the role of social media.

At one point he dismisses us as a party that started with an internet-based appeal. Presumably the early socialists, or dare I say Leninists, did not use the most modern forms of communication of their time (newspapers) to launch parties or appeals, preferring just to have factory meetings. Che and Fidel used the radio very effectively from the Sierra Maestra. What is so terrible about a film and the internet helping the formation of 80-odd local groups? Given the weakening of trade unions and the numbers of precarious, often young, workers who are not unionised, any means of reaching them should be seized, not sneered at.

2) “it prioritises a chimerical ‘left unity’ over class unity”

Murray seems to reduce class unity to broad united campaigns, building the unions and voting for Ed Miliband. LU, or forces like it, do not think a movement headed by ‘one nation’ Miliband equals class unity – unless you redefine class unity to mean a majority Labour government.

Although Murray is very strong on purely negative balance sheets of projects such as Respect or Rifondazione he is very reticent to analyse the historic ‘success’ of pushing Labour to the left, which has nearly a century of failure behind it. You have to analyse the political content and context to see what class unity or left unity actually represents, otherwise it is just meaningless jargon.

3) “[it] misreads European experience and its applicability to Britain”

The progress of the broad left parties outside the traditional reformist parties is deliberately minimised in Murray’s article. He concedes that there may have been some limited success in the southern European countries where the Communist tradition is stronger, but ignores experiences like the Red-Green Alliance in Denmark or the Socialist Party in Holland. There are even developments in Belgium at the moment around the militant trade union area of Charleroi. Die Linke in Germany has managed to consolidate its support in the recent national elections and Luxembourg has a left party that picked up another MP in the recent elections. Izquierda Unida in the Spanish state is at 10% or more in recent polls and the Bloco in Portugal, which did not follow the Murray schema, is very much alive and well. So these new parties are not temporary or marginal and most have not resulted from major splits in the mass organisations fomented by long term embedded work. In some cases the role of open political currents outside the traditional organisations has been important. In fact where you did have a significant mass split from a traditional mass working class party, as in Italy, the experience ended badly, mainly because ex-CP members did not re-evaluate historical participation in local or national governments with reformist forces.

No doubt if Murray had been writing a few years ago he would have condemned the rather thin ranks of Syriza for confusing left unity with class unity.

4) “it fails to seriously address the Labour Party and working-class support for it”

The article argues that the space to the left of Labour is occupied by Labour because these people… still vote Labour. Here I think there is an underestimation of both the ideological and organisational weakening of Labour’s hold over working people. The SNP in Scotland operates in many ways within an ‘old Labour’ framework and has sucked up LP votes. Plaid and the Greens do the same. Even the partial success of Respect or some TUSC candidates shows that the space to the left of Labour does exist. If it was not for the undemocratic voting system the fragility of Labour’s hold would be much more quickly exposed. The Labour vote is different from the past – before, there were many more organic connections to Labour, whether through Labour clubs, meetings or other institutions. People vote Labour to keep the Tories out. It is lesser evil politics. Opinion polls, like a recent YouGov one, show people are to the left of Labour on many issues.

Miliband’s tacking to the left over energy prices and the living wage will regain some support for Labour but there is no sign that these fundamental trends are changing. In the latest version Murray is more cautious about whether Miliband will win or “will be willing or able to lead a sustained shift away from austerity politics”. Later he suggests the government could generate “an arena of struggle over its direction”. He even envisages the possible conditions for a new party after that experience. Although he still writes off LU as being able to contribute to that future project, these points tend to undermine his original thesis. He denounces LU supporters for not noticing any moves by Miliband, despite recent articles by Alan Thornett and others highlighting such shifts!

If LU was sectarian to LP activists then this point may have some weight. We work alongside Owen Jones and others to defend workers’ interests. The big question, though, is: how do you break Labourism’s hold over the working class? Do you do it purely through united front campaigns around the cuts, the bedroom tax or against imperialist war, or do you challenge it politically and electorally too? Do you postpone it or do you start to prepare the terrain now?

In the new version of the article Murray takes a dig at Ken Loach’s speech at the national People’s Assembly, because Loach questioned Labour’s commitment to reverse the cuts or austerity policies. My observations at the Assembly suggested that quite a few interventions from LP or trade union activists criticised the Labour leadership in a similar vein. Agreed, it would be a mistake to narrow down the People’s Assembly by focusing equally on the Tories’ actual austerity and the LP’s potential future austerity – but it is legitimate to allow campaigners to voice concerns where the LP today is not challenging austerity policies.

5) “[it] ignores the failures of previous new left parties and, indeed, the real state of the contemporary left”

Many people involved in LU have drawn some of the lessons of previous initiatives. We think that it is no use having an electoral intervention based on a cartel of political organisations, even if supported by a trade union. We believe you need a membership organisation and consistent local bases from which you can construct some electoral success. The actual problems of the left in any case apply as much to the forces supporting his political project. Is the CP growing? Are Morning Star sales soaring?

Murray praises Socialist Action (SA), who he says share his political approach. Since his first version however a front page article on the Socialist Action website has come out in support of the LU project. So these fine SA united front builders do think they can also put forward an open political alternative now.

Is there evidence of a growing left wing in the Labour Party? Has the Owen Jones phenomenon, which is positive, reached anything near the impact of the Bennite movement in the late 70s or 80s? Is there any evidence that the LP/TU Murray left is actually organising people or is it a pressure group? Surely you need an organised left force if it is going to be able to win significant forces in any future split.

6) “indeed, it risks being an impediment to socialists actually making the most of present opportunities for working class reconstruction and advance.”

This really takes the biscuit. LU supporters, by raising a discussion among thousands around the need for a socialist alternative and organising local groups, are somehow an obstacle for the movement. It is almost like the old CP mantra that anyone to their left are splitting the movement. It reflects Stalinist ideology that the class can only be united around one party.

He fails to give concrete examples of how we hold the movement back. Perhaps he is referring to Ken Loach’s speech which is apparently holding all the LU activists back from getting involved in the People’s Assembly or trade union activity.

Andrew Murray’s article does show one thing. Left Unity is making an impact. People would not spend their time penning such essays if the LU project did not present a challenge to their political perspectives.

This article was written for Issue 3 of Exchange – you can view the whole issue here: http://anticapitalists.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/exc3-final-web.pdf