To succeed we have to work together
Jim Osborne from Glasgow Left Unity sets out the task ahead
In this article I am going to try and present what I think is the essential task of Left Unity or any other organisation which seeks to build a society in accordance with a socialist vision. I will try to keep it simple.
Firstly I want to resurrect a concept which was flagged up by John Tummon in one of his recent posts. Unfortunately John’s proposition has been crushed as the LU debate steam roller has rolled on and it has been left flattened and forgotten in the road.
The concept is “dual power”. What this means is the “alternative” or “countervailing” power to the hegemonic power of capitalism. What John was proposing, I believe, was that the task of LU is to build this alternative power to produce a dual power scenario. My first diagram illustrates the current power balance. The embryonic forms of a proto-socialist political economy are crushed by the forces of capitalism, its forms of organisation, its state institutions and its ideology. Crushed, but there…..weak, fragmented, but there. The task is to organise them, co-ordinate them, develop them through organising in the communities (all types of communities….residential, workplace, sports clubs, etc – every type of community of which we are a part).
If we are effective then the countervailing power will grow, gather strength and challenge the hegemonic power. This is illustrated in the 2nd diagram. Over time the dual power relationship completely inverts and socialism becomes the hegemonic power……the final inversion is likely to be rapid…a social revolution in which the old hegemonic power is rapidly subdued. This revolution may or may not involve some degree of violence, but violent overthrow is not inevitable in this process. The 3rd diagram illustrates this final stage of transformation.
If we are effective then the countervailing power will grow, gather strength and challenge the hegemonic power. This is illustrated in the 2nd diagram. Over time the dual power relationship completely inverts and socialism becomes the hegemonic power……the final inversion is likely to be rapid….a social revolution in which the old hegemonic power is rapidly subdued. This revolution may or may not involve some degree of violence, but violent overthrow is not inevitable in this process. The 3rd diagram illustrates this final stage of transformation.
The other 2 diagrams define “4 frontiers”…..battlefronts which are critical to the expansion of the alternative power. There are bound to be more than 4 frontiers but I am trying to keep this as simple as possible. For example, socialism requires ownership and control of the means of production by the people…..that relates to the “asset ownership”/”asset transfer” frontier. Unless assets are to be transferred by violent expropriation (not a viable scenario in the current power balance) then asset transfers need to be financed. So that makes the 2nd frontier critical……the reconstruction of the financial system and the way it works…..with the creation of democratically accountable financial institutions including a national industrial and infrastructure bank, a sovereign wealth fund and mutualised banks, etc.
In the governance & accountability/community empowerment frontier the task is to build an active participatory democracy from the grass roots up and incorporate the principle of subsidiarity into the structure of the new democracy. In the law/law reform frontier there must be changes in law to facilitate community ownership and control, the establishment of industrial democracy and bring greater accountability into the management of our institutions of government and finance.
There is, arguably, also a frontier relating to leadership …..breaking out from command and control leadership to an enabling style of leadership, which facilitates participation by the masses in the democratic process and allows the people to discover how to take control by and for themselves instead of “doing it for them”.
It is a long, steep uphill battle to pull the boundaries of the alternative power outwards so far that the alternative power overwhelms the hegemonic power. Here is my metaphor:
This process is like pulling a long heavy goods train over a mountain range. We are going to need as many locomotives as we can find to pull this train and we are going to have to keep them all pulling together for as long as possible before any one of them runs out of steam and starts to roll back down the hill.
For goodness sake let us not prejudge which loco(s) will run out of steam and when before we have even left the station at the start. Who cares what colour the locomotive is as long as it is pulling the load, and if it does run out of steam before the destination is reached and starts to run back down the hill we can afford to let it go as long as it doesn’t derail the rest of the train.
We are currently standing on the platform arguing about who is going to take our train the furthest along the journey, instead of getting the train going and seeing where we get to. We don’t and can’t know who will want to get off at the first station….we will just have to wait and see. It is pure dogmatism to denounce others who may or may not get off the train before the end of the line. As I said we need all the locomotives we can get, whatever colour they describe themselves as, or whatever label they like to adopt. In the end it is what is inside that matters…..let us judge both ourselves and others by our actions and not merely by our words.
31 comments
31 responses to “To succeed we have to work together”
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Interesting analysis and analogies here, and I couldn’t agree more about the need to work together.
From a illustrative point of view, though, I think you have your first diagram inside out. The forces of capitalism etc are firmly in control, whereas the opposition is fragmented and in many ways dispersed. Wouldn’t it therefore be more natural to show capitalism in command at the centre, with the opposition scattered in the surrounding region – which need have no outer boundary. The more extreme the opposition party or sect, the more ‘far out’ they would be placed. Then when you have grown the opposition forces, and joined them together them sufficiently to bring about the inversion, the capitalists get cast out to the fringes where they can no longer be dominant. More satisfying to blast them to oblivion rather than end up with even a small enemy within, don’t you think!
I’m afraid the slow development of what you (cheekily) choose to call “dual power”, in the form you suggest, has a long and very disappointing history – in various manifestations.
For instance a variant of this is the entire “politico/tactical” basis for the completely failed Fabien Labourite proposition. In the nationalisation-rich post 1945 period, to the denationalisation/privatisation avalanche of the late 1970’s onwards, those of a gradualist reformist Fabien persuasion could superficially be said to be simply describing an apparent unstoppable transformational (mixed economy to full socialism) reality in the (non US) advanced Western capitalist economies.
But we now know that was a total illusion – once the capitalist classes had regrouped after the “statist” managed capitalism “mixed economy” phase after WWII, they used mass bribery of politicians and mass propaganda to institute the neoliberal fightback – still continuing to this day – and rapidly destroying all the working class gains of the postwar period.
An even more dramatic illustration of the failure of this “build the nucleus of a socialist society within capitalism – and eat capitalism from within” strategy is the catastrophic history of the German SPD. German Social Democracy up to its destruction by the Nazis was almost a “state within a state”, so comprehensive was its social welfare provision and trades union power. But of course not only did German Social Democracy totally collude with its own ruling class in the drive to WWI, it also colluded with the German military to destroy the revolutionary socialist upheavals wracking Germany after the WWI defeat. And of course it proved incapable of standing up to the rise of Nazism in the late 20’s and early 30’s – so trapped in the ideology of “gradualism” and “constitutionalism” were its leaders.
In the current UK context a highly symbolic recent event , missed by most on the Left, is of course the imminent potential collapse of the entire Cooperative Group of consumer owned high street stores because of the disastrous losses of the Co-operative Bank due to the long-running dodgy mortgage problem which sparked the 2008 Banking Crash. So rather than the Co-operative Movement “undermining” and eventually superseding capitalism, “from inside” as many of its founders and Labour Movement supporters , since about 1848, hoped – the capitalist system has brought it low instead – and Tesco could yet end up being able to buy up all its high street sites !
I’m afraid your at first sight “radical”, even “revolutionary” proposition, with accompanying dodgy diagrams (!), is actually just an old, failed, reformist idea, dressed in some radical clothing. The fact is capitalism simply can’t be ever so gradually “reformed” away from within – by building ever greater “red bases” within its structures. Today, we are well into the first stormy phase of a systemic world capitalist crisis of basic profitability. The capitalist class has basically run out of innovatory advances within the current “Long Wave” cycle of capitalist development which characterised the post 1945 growth wave – based on cheap oil, mass automated production, advances in chemicals and materials, and massive improvements in communications and shipping/transportation – and lastly, computerisation. To keep the rate of profit up whilst their system searches for a new “growth wave technological mix” the capitalist class intend to “turn all our pockets out” and destroy the welfare systems of the advanced economies. This of course will simply deepen the world Slump – and produce an era of wars , revolutions and dictatorships – on a 1930’s scale.
Our response to this, as radical socialists must be neither to fall into abstract and futile “project hatching” of the sort the lead article describes, nor to announce the immediate “storming of the barricades/General Strike Now! moment has arrived. Today is NOT the era to spend decades building localist “alternative structures” of “everyday working class life” to simply ameliorate the conditions of the working class under the knout of the Austerity Offensive. The task of the radical Socialist today is not to set up soup kitchens and self organised crèches, but to help lead and build radical active resistance to the Austerity Offensive in all its manifestations, in the community and the workplace – and in the electoral arena too.
The Austerity Offensive must be directly confronted and challenged though the building of active mass resistance, on the streets, in the workplace. Difficult as this is, it is a task infinitely more important than sowing illusions in the ability of “alternative socialist structures” to be built within capitalism. The term “Dual Power” does not describe this reformist process at all. In fact it is a gross misrepresentation of what the term “Dual Power” means. “Dual Power” will eventually emerge when/if the mass resistance of the working class simply stops the capitalist class in its tracks from implementing its profit-maintaining Austerity Offensive – probably alongside a huge electoral advance by the Left. Greece is closest to this situation today in Europe.
We have a long, long way to go before that becomes an issue at all. At present the working class is in total retreat. The task of Left Unity should be to build an uncompromising mass resistance movement – based on a comprehensive manifesto of essentially reformist “transitional” (but in a capitalist crisis – also not fully achievable) demands, and total rejection of the ideology and detail of the Austerity Offensive . Effective mass resistance will eventually raise the real meaning of “Dual Power” on the national, and international, political class struggle agenda.
Councils, also known as Soviets in Russia, & communes in France, e.g. Paris Commune 1871, are very much needed.
These are the alternative set of institutions that need to be built to enable direct, participatory democracy under socialism to be realised.
Unfortunately, it currently looks like LU is too focused on elections to pursue this.
IOPS (http://www.iopsociety.org/) set out a clear vision based on participatory democracy on an international scale (they call them chapters), but they appear to be lacking any support.
Could People’s Assemblies take on this role?
What is the difference between a People’s assembly and a local council?
It is easy to hark back to something that happened 150 years ago, but (in the friendliest possible way) it would be best to outline concrete proposals relative to what we have now.
Mass Union membership that gives amazing benefits and a voice of power to miserable, marginalised workers needs to come first. I’m a forty year old mature student of English with a 14 year old son. I grew up in Tony Benn’s constituency and marched with Dennis Skinner. My Granddad was a semi illiterate trade Union man on the docks of Kingston Upon Hull, he agitated for change when they were losing a man a fortnight on the docks and he taught me about William Willberforce. I am one of twelve Grandchildren from a Hull docking family of seven. My father was an ex serviceman who went into a glass factory in Derbyshire Chesterfield. I am an undergrad and writer. I was fourteen during the pit strikes, now I live in tin country in Cornwall.
People don’t remember the support and community that Union membership brings anymore. I grew up with it, never forgot. But some never had it and all they know is the capitalist hegemonic narrative of Unions bringing the country to its knees via the likes of Thatcher, Tebbit and The Daily Mail.
Union activism needs fresh breath breathing into it and from their Unity will grow.
Discovering you via the Guardian today made me excited.
I want to be part of a party that is like the one my Granddad fought to build with old Labour.
Everyone in my house is signed up to found this new struggle, I will be sharing this with all my friends and encouraging them to join.
Well bloody done and please do as much as possible to get working people back to their unions.
What a great post, LU needs people like you
btw, have you heard of Unite Community? its for anyone unwaged and includes students, etc, it is really taking off.
Thanks Jonno,
We all signed up for £2.00 because we can afford that.
I’m down in North Cornwall. Before I went to Uni I was a site agent in construction and when the bottom dropped in construction and I was made redundant I worked as a volunteer for BTCV taking lads and lasses from traditional mining areas like Camborne and Redruth on site to build paths, bridges and learn trade skills in rural building conservation.
Back then they got money to do this, if they were unemployed and they accrued NVQ’s. But more importantly to me these fourth and fifth generation Cornish kids from collapsed mining communities got a chance to take their land back in terms of craft and building to traditional specs and lots got NVQ’s and enough confidence and a reference good enough to secure jobs with local Cornish businessmen in building and agriculture and nurseries.
A lot of them ended up bringing Uncles and Dad’s along for the crack, it helped build community spirit and reclaim culture and history of the land.
The end of funding for this has dumped these kids back into stacking shelves for nothing or doing work fare in warehouses miles from where they live.
This is largely why I want to represent Left Unity in Cornwall. I’m from the coalfields of Derbyshire and Notts. The Cornwall that I love is the Cornwall of South Crofty and the working class Cornish communities that surround it.
Touristy gentrified second home Cornwall, is why the work force busts a gut for minimum wage doing 70 hour weeks and then suffers the ire and patronising attitude of the Employment Department in winter when the second home owning red braces go home and workers are laid off and left scratching to pay massive fuel bills in expensive rented property that the same up country speculators have bought to rent.
It’s a disgrace that Cornwall should need left Unity and my bloke who is Welsh says Plaid would follow suit given that they have the same history of mining and land buy out by the privileged as the Cornish.
Labour has sold these communities down the river, their history treated without respect, their MP’s spouting crappy party rhetoric.
These people need a workers party and strong unionism to support their communities against property speculation, feudal servitude and corrupt council sponsored land appropriation.
I want to be a member of a party that not only recognises but also tackles this sort of thing Here’s hoping and £2.00 :)
Fran
I am near Lands End and just discovered Left Unity like you. I want to get a group up and running but have had no response from LU.
Can we get together?
Neil
An interesting model. I’m sure the building of an (alternative) socialist culture and socialist institutions is crucial to undermining the neo-liberal dominance. It will be difficult and slow, but there is simply no option.
I see John Penney just can’t drag himself away from oppositional politics and the time worn and discredited theory that revolution will be built by a struggle against the present rather than a struggle for the future.
Of course socialism will not be built by one without the other but the two sides of the coin and not dialectically equal….the struggle to build something new has to dominate over the struggle against the old. Oppositional socialism is just dreary drudgery, lacking in hope…..it must have a positive vision, something positive to strive for.
This is really the nub of the debate about what LU is about. I just hope that the platforms/factions (or whatever you want to call them) who are peddling endless oppositional politics finish in second place, but I also hope that they don’t derail the train if they lose the argument.
As I have said elsewhere in another post(s) oppositional politics leads to reactive politics….responding to someone else’s agenda….positive, visionary politics creates its own agenda.
Of course there will be setbacks, that is where vision and leadership are so critical. These situations will be encountered along the journey and they will have to be dealt with as and when they occur. It is not possible to predict in advance how the journey will unfold…we just have to embark on it….but it has to be OUR journey, not one defined by capitalism’s agenda and, in the current political situation, be about more than just opposing “austerity”.
In reply to John Collingwood…..I think the configuration I chose works best but he has a reasonable enough alternative. My way of illustrating the situation is based on the idea of the weaker power being crushed…potentially to vanishing point at the “centre”. Thus the arrows in Diagram 4 are the forces which are crushing the development of socialist forms of economic and social organisation and are, therefore, frontiers where the struggle for socialism has to take place. Winning on these frontiers expands the power outwards, pushing the hegemonic power back and eventually overwhelming it.
This expansion out from the centre will not be smooth and may well go through phases of advance and retreat before final victory…..What is described is just a simplified general model to try and illustrate how the future would unfold in a “dual power” scenario.
LU needs good policies articulated in everyday language that will attract UK voters, a clear pathway to a more collective society and a commitment to participative democracy. Couple this with community action now to help individuals and LU will achieve success. Someone should tell the advocates of class struggle about the oozlum bird.
Someone should point you in the direction of The Green Party, or even the Lib Dems, David. Anyone who denies there is a vicious class struggle going on today , manifested by the huge continuing transfer of wealth from poor to rich represented by the worldwide Austerity Offensive, is a scoundrel or a fool.
‘Scoundrel or fool?’ Now what’s the point in that unpleasantness? Can’t you express disagreement more civilly?
Class is real. Nothing to do with ‘oozlum birds’ but the current structure of society.
I was just reading all the above, I can’t say I really understand any of it.
But to me if we put a stop to fractional reserve banking, tax the rich the way Norway does, don’t go to war every time the US shouts oil, explore small pebble bed nuclear energy options (which are quite different to old nuclear plants) explore ocean energy and pile all our war cash into ramping up our home grown tech experts and engineering ability the way the Scandinavian countries do then we might begin to change?
I’d like to see the House of Lords seats given to University Academics who are experts in their field and hold a chair in that field.
I’d also like to see water re nationalised and innovated as an energy and utility source with university partners.
I’d like to see the energy companies made more accountable regarding profits and re investment in community. Semi nationalised regarding workers and pay and controls on profits.
The railways could be re nationalised with partners who are local councils and British owned private engineering, waste, energy, ground working, building and coach building firms.
Councils definitely need to be FORCED to insist that every single private sector new build on council land offers fifty percent social housing and government should pay for it. Considering that they took the revenue from the sell off of council houses, the government still owe communities without housing the balance of profit on sold off social housing.
I’d also like to see land ownership summarily removed from from feudal Lords and crown and a veto on foreign buyers. I know that is a big one, but still they got that land via subjugation and feudal serfdom how did that get past Cromwell?
Land in this country should be owned nationally, no single family or country or council should be owning huge tracts of land and lifetime lease should be given subject to value to local community regarding use, open forum community input should be considered first and council input second. Parish councils should have more power regarding land use.
Car parks should have a minimum toll for locals in every town.
Schools should NEVER be allowed to be private, it creates an unfair system of division. Eton and Harrow need to become public or be gone to the states and take the feudal clothing of privilege with them.
University should be free for all students regardless of income, places based on merit.
And the NHS deserves to be made the singular brilliant health care provider that Aneurin Bevan visualised and that the people of Britain paid for and should still be able to feel proud of and use today.
Old people who own their homes should NOT be getting sold out of their homes & put in care before people who live in social housing, this is a disgusting practice that needs to end. I have seen old couples split up by social services and sent off to separate sex private care homes at god only knows how much a month. Wrong wrong wrong, they worked for their security and they earned it.
Jim (Osbourne),
I think the article was a good attempt, but got a little lost in translation. In future could you put diagram captions in explaining in detail exactly what you mean by each one, and then refer to the figures in the text? Perhaps I’m a bit thick, but I found it difficult to fully follow you train of thought.
Also, more fundamentally, I’m not sure we can fully represent structures by concentric circles. the power structure is more of a set of interlinked flow charts. One for the state (Central government, local government, civil service, military/police, Quango’s) and one for the private sector (finance sector and large industry (with their influences via clubs, lobbying groups, campaign financing), and small scale private sector).
I would prefer to see something more concrete in terms of exactly how you propose to re-arrange these power structures.
is was a good attempt, but Contrary to some of the
As a few people who have posted comments have said they don’t understand my article and/or the diagrams I will do my best to offer some further explanation and hope that it helps.
Diagram 1 attempts to illustrate the present power balance in which capitalism is hegemonic (the grey area of the circle). Embryonic forms of socialist economic and social organisation exist but are fragmented and crushed by the dominance of capitalist forms and ideology. Even the embryonic socialist forms are vulnerable to corruption and retreat back into capitalist forms.
Diagram 2 illustrates a scenario where socialist politics has succeeded in strengthening the embryonic forms of socialist economic and social organisation, linking up “islands” of an emerging socialism but not yet the dominant power.
Diagram 3 illustrates the scenario where socialism has overwhelmed capitalist forms of economy and society and any remnants of the old order are in retreat, and are now being crushed by the new order.
Diagram 4 attempts to illustrate 4 of the battlefronts (“frontiers”) along which capitalism exerts its force to crush socialist forms of society and economy.
Diagram 5 illustrates how the forces fighting for socialism must fight back along these “frontiers”
So, on the frontier of “asset ownership” capitalism exerts its power through private ownership of property and the means of production….socialism struggles for the transfer of assets to the people.
On the “finance” frontier, the capitalist financial system reinforces private ownership and facilitates the control of money/financial assets by financial elite. Socialism must struggle to subject the financial system to democratic control, so that all financial institutions are accountable to the people and not to narrow class interests. Democratic control of finance is necessary to facilitate the peaceful (if possible) transfer of assets (property, land, means of production, etc) into ownership by the people. …publicly accountable finance is used to “purchase” privately owned assets for the common ownership of the people.
In the governance & accountability frontier the battle is over centralisation –v- decentralisation of economic and political power. Socialism requires the transfer of power to communities. The principle of subsidiarity is essential to socialism….it is the principle that every decision is taken at the most local level possible, that production is carried out as locally as possible and that where this is not possible responsibility is delegated upwards with the “higher level” being fully accountable to the “lower level”. It also requires the establishment of industrial and financial democracy.
It is also important to recognise that it is on this frontier that the battle to create a participatory democracy will be fought. Without active, participatory democracy, nothing else can progress towards a fully socialist society. Where embryonic socialist forms have emerged it is the failure to build active participation that has enabled these forms to be corrupted and reabsorbed back into the capitalist system.
Capitalism is adaptive and has proven capable of “allowing” socialist experimental forms to develop and then absorb them back into the system….the willingness of capitalism to support “social enterprise” is a good example….and what has facilitated the re-absorption is the failure to build broad popular participation in these organisational forms.
In the “law” frontier the development of socialism will require new laws to support the establishment of industrial and financial democracy, community empowerment, asset transfer, etc ,etc.
A 5th frontier, not included in the diagrams is the “leadership” frontier. Socialism requires a new style of leader, distinct from the command and control leadership engendered by capitalism and the form of democracy associated with capitalism. Socialist leadership has to be “enabling” not “controlling”….it is a selfless form of leadership, patient, self critical, willing to learn and avoids dogmatism.
I hope this helps.
JIM
Recently I posted a piece on my ZCommunications blog space which raised similar issues to those presented by Jim Osborne. It is built around Gramsci’s idea of the war of position and of manoeuvre, drawing upon my own experience of trade union, cooperative and community struggles and relating to some contemporary left debates. It was an attempt to provide some theoretical underpinning to uniting forms of struggle relating to alternative space and those that depend on generalisation and mass mobilisation. The conclusion I keep being drawn to is the importance of a political strategy in both forms of struggle that stresses a process of developing transitional actions and demands whenever possible. Anyway I’d appreciate it Jim – and any other comrade who may be interested – if you think it is useful it is called ‘Bridging the Gap’: http://www.zcommunications.org/from-where-we-are-to-socialism-by-len-arthur.html
Len, I think your “Bridging the Gap” piece is useful. I suggest you e-mail me at jim.osborne@talk21.com and we can talk some more.
I am not that interested in theory…..I don’t have time for it…I just want to “get on with it” and fit it into my other activities like climbing (if I manage to recover from my recent serious climbing accident) , cycling and so on.
JIM
Jim provides a perfect illustration of the fundamental flaw in the LU project. There are no “embryonic forms of a proto-socialist political economy”. Our society is almost completely described by the language and culture of the Capitalist class. Everything, down to life-saving decisions on allocation of resources, is reduced to a sordid competition. Every aspect of social life is likened to a business practice. Our children are taught to believe that there is only one way of running a country; that businesses are the only legitimate mechanism of interaction and distribution. The prevailing ideas that Marx mentioned are no longer prevailing, they have prevailed.
If you doubt the validity of this assertion just consider a couple of examples. The capitalist class are able to continue to insist on their language of competition whilst attempting to solve the banking crisis by printing money. The media have gleefully cheered on an economic recovery based on services despite the Capitalist class themselves having indicated that a return to the importance of manufacturing was necessary.
A bigger, elephantine confidence trick taking in the intellectuals, the journalists, the liberals, the reformist left and just about everyone else in the country who isn’t a Marxist is the acceptance of the keystone of the Capitalist cultural onslaught – that banks create wealth and so must be saved.
No bank has ever created a cent of wealth.
Of course convincing people that profit and wealth are the same thing is just another way of assessing the totality of the Capitalist cultural success.
Does this mean they’ve won ? That history is over ? That Socialism is no longer possible ?
Emphatically no. The fundamentals have not changed. Those fundamentals include the intrinsic necessity of the Capitalist class to exploit a working class and ensure that for most people in the world the problems are never, can never be, solved. Never, that is, without destroying the system that continually re-creates them.
The LU project is not immune from consideration of these fundamental truths. It is clear from Jim’s assertion of mythical proto-socialist forms that he believes in a gradual process whereby weight of opinion slowly, surely, justly transforms the economic relationships of a country. If it’s a gradual process and at some point in the future Socialist methods become dominant then there must be some esoteric seed, however small and inconsequential, already existing, right Jim ?
Jim’s an idealist. In the Marxist sense. It is the clear tendency behind the LU project. Ken Loach is a nice man and I don’t doubt for a minute that his intention is to use his name to kick-start a movement rather than lead one. It’s an honourable thing to do but it won’t work if the same mistakes are repeated. The idealists have had over a century to posit reform against revolution and have ended with the bumbling, amorphous, reactionary Milliband to show for it. Change will not be achieved through the machinations of intellectuals but through the action of the exploited class, as a class, for itself, consciously.
I am not arguing against the discussion of ideas, political philosophies and economic models. Ideas are important. Neither am I a syndicalist; intellectuals have a role to play but ideas inform, not lead, the struggle for Socialism.
In 1986 I was taken, along with around a thousand other students, from the University of London to the print workers picket line at Wapping. A stupid, crass decision by someone in the SWP, most likely one of the police spies that that organisation must, even by then, have been riddled with. It certainly frightened me. Two years previously the SWP could, by sending all it’s members to the battle between miners and cops at Orgreave, have doubled the NUM mass picket, outnumbered Thatcher’s henchmen and turned the tide of a flagging strike. It didn’t, it wasn’t ready to make that commitment. At a crucial time a party bathed in Marxist theory and forever agitating for militant trade union action was found wanting, too wary of it’s own survival, too self-conscious.
LU is attempting to re-start the reformist tradition so that people may once again in their millions take to their hearts a movement which promises change but which will insist on working within and inevitably protecting the Capitalist system. Insisting on the necessity of bailing out the most catastrophic failures.
I would urge Socialists to consider our history and consider the nature of our failure thus far. Ask yourself if a left wing version of UKIP is a new idea, if a forum for ideas has ever made a revolution, if the Second International was really the repository of any latent power, if it helps or hinders our cause to turn in desperation to tried and failed methods.
Voters in the UK will not go for extreme class struggle rhetoric.
Class struggle is a particular view of the world which will lead LU nowhere. I hope this view will not become dominant because it will lead to certain failure as amply demonstrated by the history of left wing groups in the UK for the last 50 years or more.There are alternative views and it would be good to encourage other Left Unity supporters to speak out to counter this distorted view of the world and what is need for electoral success.
David, you’ve missed the intension of my contribution. It is the measurement of success through election to a bourgeois parliament that has given you Kinnock, Blair and Miliband. For Socialists success is the destruction of that allure.
Please do speak out.
But the problem is that there really aren’t alternative views about class, just illusions.
Class exists, denying it is the ruling class’s game, not ours.
If Jerry Pepin’s analysis is correct then there really is no hope whatsoever. But it isn’t right…..things are never black and white as he seems to think. Embryonic forms of socialist social organisation do exist…JP just analyses them as hopelessly capitalistic without recognising the contradictions which exist within them. Democracy is one of the seeds…but the form of democracy we have is not sufficient to support a socialist political system since it is a top down form of democracy, not a participatory democracy….but a participatory democracy can be built from within it.
If anyone is an “idealist” in the Marxist sense (or any other sense) it is Jerry as he seems to think revolution can be conjured out of thin air.
Nowhere did I suggest a conjuring trick, Jim. Quite the opposite. Revolutions are not conjured by a benevolent third party, they are organic outbursts of an oppressed group. A Socialist revolution is very specifically the conscious action of a working class taking power for itself, conjured by no-one; not a Stalinist party, not a religion and not a party of liberal intellectuals. But then revolution isn’t how you see things changing, Jim. Your roadmap puts the cart before the horse. You would have the Capitalists acquiesce to a slow, peaceful erosion of their power with only a final flurry of revolutionary dressing to copper-fasten a done-deal. It is this belief – that the Capitalist class would stand idly by whilst Socialists slowly convinced the population of the righteousness of their arguments – that Marx referred to as Idealism.
Jerry’s politics strikes me as a good example to explain the total failure of the left in Britain to make any impact during the last four decades. It really is a dismal philosophy. It has parallels with the believers in the “second coming” when “all will be revealed” in some final apocalyptic event. Idealism in its most strident form. Jerry has no objective understanding of what “idealism” is….apart from it being a label he sticks on everything he disagrees with.
The description of revolution as “organic outbursts of an oppressed group” has a quasi intellectual flavour to it but is meaningless….for “organic” I would suggest he really means “spontaneous”. So the implication of that is that the role of “revolutionaries” is either to sit around and wait for this “second coming” or to do what they can to facilitate such levels of misery and desperation that a “spontaneous uprising” sweeps all before it.
How does Jerry suppose that the masses will be ready to govern themselves if all they have done is expend their energies in a constant battle concerned only with opposing whatever forms of oppression they face? The masses will only be able to govern for themselves by seeking to build the new forms of social and economic organisation that will liberate them. This is a struggle to build something new, not just a struggle against something old.
This is objective reality, not idealism. If Jerry and his ilk want to carry on dreaming of their “second coming” they will remain as irrelevant as ever.
What “revolutionaries” do is to help the oppressed group to open its eyes and ears – ie awareness-raising. Not facilitating misery by deliberately making material conditions worse, but presenting a hard-headed picture of how far out of kilter the current situation has become, in relation to what could and should be.
Most people adapt to oppression – it is usually easier than fighting it – and the group develops its own self-supportive culture to help hide the problems from constant view. That is how the ruling class can get away with ratcheting up the oppression to levels that would be preposterously unacceptable if seen from an earlier stage in the process. (Try googling the ‘boiling frog syndrome’.) Because most of us are biased to be amenable rather than awkward (lefties apart!), the ruling class are even able to hide from themselves the degree to which they are exploiting others (ie ‘making money’), and many will genuinely believe that they are acting wisely and virtuously. To use the term ‘brainwashing’ would sound melodramatic, because that implies some conscious attempt at villainy, but the end result is similar – one’s perspective adapts to suppress that which is unsightly.
So the revolutionary’s task is also to help the oppressed to reinterpret what they see and hear, so that they are driven to realise that they are in a completely intolerable situation – as a group. What happens next is by its nature chaotic, and depends on what might trigger an explosion of the critical mass of disaffection.
Finally, the revolutionary obviously has a moral obligation to be ready with a plan for reconstruction, etc, because there is no way that the masses will be able to govern for themselves without some form of coherent leadership.
That is the basis of why I think that Jerry is right to be unconvinced by the idea of socialism actually being allowed to grow in parallel with the status quo, building sufficient strength to take over in a well-ordered process. That would be unrealistic in the same sort of way as the neo-classical economist’s dominant but hopelessly fictitious idea of the perfectly informed and perfectly logical actions of the ideal ‘market’.
That is a much more coherent response John C. I don’t fundamentally disagree with your description of the task of revolutionaries……but it is not a case of “one or the other”….BOTH are important but I would put greater emphasis on building the new whilst fighting the old.
No problem with that!
I think it is important to remember that because the people were not ready to take over the management of the economy in revolutionary Russia that Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks were compelled to rely on the old factory managers and other technocrats to continue managing the factories and other parts of the economy and this marked a setback for the revolution. Building the new as a countervailing power to the hegemony of capitalism is a necessary part of preparing the people for power.