Further thoughts on the second Left Unity meeting

Sophie Katz writes on the latest Left Unity meeting

Time to Party

On the 4^th of Feb a ‘November 14 Left Unity’ group held a meeting about a new party. Good turn out. Not too old. Some interesting points made. Everybody tried very hard not to be sectarian. Lots of self-criticism about ‘my old organisation.’ A couple of key issues popped up by the end. What should we think about Labour? Is Owen’s (author of Chavs) call for anti austerity unity across Labour and the outside left a rerun of Benn’s huge 1980’s Socialist Movement?  Where does any social strength for a new party come? (We are not Kevin Costner and his baseball field. If we ‘call’, it is extremely doubtful that ‘they will come.’) What about leftists outside organisations and those who are still in the groups? Should we all work together on a campaign ‘to build up trust’ and ‘do something useful’?

Somebody spoke of Benn’s efforts to build the Socialist Movement and pointed out that they were successful because the impressive Socialist Movement (tens of thousands) rested on the foundations of the great Miner’s strike, the most important domestic battle since 1926. This point should have reminded everybody that needed reminding that sectarianism is not primarily about being nasty to other political groups (or your own), it is about the across the board failure to understand that your politics and action are functioning separately and distinctly, and determined by other causes, than from the concrete interests and activity of the working class. Setting up working class organisation has to be intimately linked to the specific requirements and interests of the class you seek to serve and lead.

New parties have to do something new; something that has not been done before and is not able to be done within and by the current organisations and parties.  Historically speaking the Labour Party was set up to make sure working class (men) could get voted into Parliament. New parties have to answer the concrete question or questions in the minds of hundreds of thousands if not millions.

The push towards new forms of political organisation among subordinate classes have, in the last century in Europe, been associated with the expansion of self-organisation and then, since 1989, in a qualitatively smaller way, via the already existing deep political traditions of the left already rooted in the working class and which have retained some of their resilience and attraction to new forces, despite and sometimes because of, the collapse of the USSR. The current capitalist crisis has created a new radicalisation on both the left and the right, the best of which on the left has already been attracted to some of these older formations. The catastrophic depth of the crisis in Greece has already brought one of these formations to within a whisker of government. (A similar process, all proportions guarded, was seen at the outset of the Spanish Civil War and the rise of the POUM.)

In the case of most of the modern western world, especially in Britain but with the vital exception of the remains of the trade union movement, most of the traditional self-organisation and political expression of modern working class layers in society has virtually ceased. However, it would be silly to demand that late 19^th and early 20^th century history repeat itself. That would make politics very easy. The massive extension of basic social and economic self-organisation as witnessed in that period cannot be assumed to be a precondition for the development of political formation. We are not stagists. Living forces rarely work by methodical steps up a preordained ladder. Although the last historically huge movement into politics by whole classes across Europe was part of that trend, it was not always thus. It is the struggle of the working class, not its precise organisation or formation or indeed the order in which these questions are addressed, which is the precondition that bridges the centuries when it comes to the success or otherwise of any political grouping that seeks to represent it.

In the early 19^th century in Britain it was the Chartist movement for political reform that actually bound together the handloom weavers in the villages with the spinners in the new cities; the families digging out coal in the hills of Shropshire and the shoemaker shop workers in London. The Charter was a political movement that gave the first independent political expression to the new working class of Britain. The Charter brought the new class into existence for itself.

Today any non-sectarian who feels the need to form a new party has to examine in detail the actual condition of the working class and its movements, in their most concrete detail. As yet the struggle against austerity is intermittent and sporadic. No national anti-austerity mass front has emerged. But, a unique combination is emerging of a trade union movement (in part a precious seed bed of experience and working class memory, understanding and action) with a radicalising and activist wing. (That despite the abject failure of various left group forays into working class leadership of the ‘we are here’ variety in various elections.) And, at the same time, collective, community and sectoral action is being taken by hundreds of campaigns defending what is seen as the peoples’ assets against the rich.

This is what is. Any new political formation would need to be based on ‘the here and now’ left wing of the trade union movement and the ‘here and now’ community action. It would also have to have a serious tactic towards the Labour Party – as no new formation will convince enough people that its alternative policy to austerity has a chance of being implemented however attractive it might be.  Amending Labour’s policy will inevitably be seen as the only practical politics. But strategic direction of any such tactic towards Labour will only succeed if it has the same quality as the understanding of the early Labour Representation Committee towards the Liberal Party in the late 19^th century. In other words our tactic will be based on our strategic understanding that Labour is holed below the water line from the point of view of its capacity to represent the working class interest against austerity and that when the time is ripe, our call will be to ‘abandon ship.’ Which means in the mean time that we have the deepest possible concern in marshalling all available survivors for their lifeboats.

Sophie Katz