The East London (Hackney/Tower Hamlets) Statement on the Aims of Left Unity – and the Platform Debate

Pete green from Hackney Left Unity comments on the consensus of Left Unity’s aims at a local level and the platform debate.

Some of you who have looked through the package of documents for the founding conference, available on the website, may have noticed a document from “Tower Hamlets/Hackney”  set amidst the various platform proposals in the  Aims section. It sits rather forlornly as the only contribution from local groups (apart from amendments) in that part of the conference. Indeed it was originally drafted in the wake of the first national meeting of Left Unity in the hope of finding the common ground on which we could agree and thereby avoid the polarising impact of what soon after became the platform debate. Obviously it failed to achieve that objective. So why is it still on the agenda and how compatible is it with the Aims section of the Constitution as drafted by the working party, or the various platforms?

With the critical point (a) in the Aims (the one which begins ‘to unite the diverse strands of  radical and socialist politics in the UK…)  the East London statement is clearly in harmony even if our wording is slightly different and rather less comprehensive  than what follows in the draft constitution. It is also arguably compatible with the revised version of the left platform and in September one supporter of that platform in the Hackney group suggested the statement could be withdrawn. But several of the contributors to the earlier debate had not signed any of the platforms and most still wanted our contribution to remain on the agenda.

The statement was originally drafted and discussed when there was an East London group which subsequently split [geographically] into Hackney and Tower Hamlets in June. That split delayed any final agreement on a couple of outstanding issues (and it was the Hackney group alone that agreed the final version) and the emergence of the platforms in the course of the summer left the statement looking as if it had been overtaken by political developments. Its policy positions are certainly very general and will necessarily be replaced by or subsumed into the more specific policy commission proposals, scheduled for discussion at the spring conference. The bullet-point format was designed to make the document clear and easy to amend  by comparison with the  lengthy draft statement submitted to the first national meeting which proved impossible to debate effectively in the time available – but that no longer matters very much.

What is worth emphasising is how little disagreement there was on most of the substantive issues. Admittedly there was no prominent spokesperson for the Socialist platform in our ranks but East London Left Unity as in most groups, embraced supporters from a wide range of political backgrounds or none at all. The report I wrote for this website on our first meetings back in April and May was optimistic about that diversity and the first draft of the statement attempted to express that. The fact that one of the younger supporters who had been active in UK Uncut, went to the first left unity national meeting, posted a critical report and has not been seen since (although he and some of those close to him were involved in the People’s Assembly for a while), was, however,  a warning signal about how easily that mood of optimism could  dissolve. Others clearly began to doubt whether we would ever be more than a talking-shop and endless debate about ‘what sort of party or movement we want it to be’ probably didn’t help dispel that impression.

Yet a good dozen or so supporters became engaged in  a serious and  constructive  discussion which involved  changing several points and adding new ones (eg against privatisation of the royal mail or for a commitment to ‘animal welfare’ – the latter not an issue which has featured anywhere else sadly).  Debate online and in meetings often focused on the precise wording of phrases and the meaning of terms which many of us who have been in the labour movement for many years simply take for granted.  One disagreement was over whether should we use the term ‘working-class’ or ‘working people’  –  and my longstanding preference for the former was voted down on the understandable grounds that the term ‘working-class’ is understood by many in a very restricted sense of the term (as a Marxist and Natfhe/UCU secretary in a further education college for many years I never had any problem regarding FE lecturers, for example, as workers – but others evidently disagree. It’s not such a critical issue as some believe).  We also learnt to be careful not to refer to the ‘disabled’ en masse as a ‘vulnerable group’. This was all very healthy to my mind.

Perhaps the most significant disagreement came over section 8 “On Anti-Capitalism

• We are against a system whose benefits go  disproportionately to 1% of the population and which is responsible for devastating economic and ecological crises across the planet
• We are ultimately for a radical social transformation based on the principle of ‘people not profit’ and drawing on the best of the cooperative, radical democratic, feminist, green and socialist traditions (although we may disagree on how such a transformation can eventually be achieved).

The criticism of this section came from two very different sources. On the one hand a supporter of the left platform advocated replacing the term ‘Anti-Capitalism’ with ‘Neo-Liberalism’. In response  (and for the rest of this contribution I am arguing from my own standpoint ) I made an argument which prevailed in the final version as agreed in a Hackney meeting. Neo-liberalism is an ideology, a rationalisation for particular policies such as privatisation and deregulation. We certainly need to be against it but  we also need to be clear that this is an ideology which serves the interests of those who  are running the system – the 1%. If we are not clear about the nature of the enemy – that neo-liberalism is merely a term to describe the latest manifestation of global capitalism – then we are, as some in the socialist platform have suggested, in danger of misleading people. We need to recognise that the other side are, as the billionaire Warren Buffett put it in words to this effect, ‘engaged in class war – and my side is winning’. The people responsible for the protracted economic crisis through which we are still living have ruthlessly ensured that the costs of that crisis are borne by the vast majority. But this is how capitalism worked in the 1930s and the 1980s and it is a mistake to regard ‘austerity’ as an error of policy as many Keynesians do. It has certainly resulted in a ‘recovery for the few not the many’ but that was and remains the objective.

There is a further point about language made  by a member of the East London group in one of our very first meetings – neo-liberalism is he insisted,  ‘a word ordinary people don’t understand’ and we have to use a language which is clear and not academic. But, he agreed, people do know what’s meant by capitalism – and they do recognise that the slogan ‘people not profit’ stands for an alternative principle for a very different kind of  economic system. Which is why we used it.

Which brings me to the criticism from a very different political angle.  This was voiced by a prominent supporter of the socialist platform from outside of East London whom I vainly tried to persuade of the merits of our document before the platform debate had been launched. Looking at section 8 in particular he commented that it was a ‘postmodernist portmanteau’ by which he meant that it equated all the different traditions  (cooperative, radical democratic, feminist, green and socialist) – rather than identifying socialism as the project which can embrace all the others.

This, of course, locates the fundamental political difference at stake in the platform debate. Do those of us who are socialist think that we have a ready-made package, a programme which can solve all ills, and all we have to do is to declare that loudly enough and the masses will eventually rally to our banner? Or does the sorry history of the left (social-democratic and Trotskyist, leaving aside the monstrosity of Stalinism which, of course, both sides of this debate reject) over the last thirty years – not just in Britain but across much of the globe –not suggest that a little humility might be in order, a willingness to acknowledge that we don’t have all the answers. As Mike Marqusee put it in an incisive contribution on this site in support of the left platform

‘There’s a school of thought that views pluralism as some kind of liberal or post-modern concession to the agnostic, the confused or the incompletely enlightened. But I’d suggest the real premise and promise of pluralism is founded on the demonstrable reality that  at the moment no one is in exclusive possession of anything even approximating the ultimate strategic truths of the struggle for socialism.’

To put it another way, we have to start from where most people, employed and unemployed young and retired (as I am now), are at in terms of their everyday reality and consciousness. We must start from the objective need right now, today, for a party which provides an alternative on the left to both the Labour Party and the self-proclaimed revolutionary vanguard parties trapped in their sectarian ghettoland. That entails a recognition that we need to unite those who agree on the need for a different society but who in the words of the Hackney/Tower Hamlets statement ‘may disagree on how such a transformation can eventually be achieved’.

A final personal comment may be in order given a tendency on the part of some supporters of the socialist platform to accuse critics from the left of ‘covering up ’their politics. My own politics, as described on my facebook page, are those of a ‘libertarian communist’ although for many years I have also adhered to the label ‘international socialist’ and can happily switch between the  two. This puts me not to the right but in  a critical sense to the left of the ‘socialist platform’. Its supporters, on the one hand, insist that a new party has to stand for socialism and nothing less than that will do.  On the other hand they insist that they are not calling for a revolution or a movement which will dismantle the existing state machine. What this implies is that like the old Communist Party of Britain they retain a version of a parliamentary road to socialism in one country although some may vehemently reject this description.

My own vision of  that ‘radical transformation’  by contrast remains as it was back in 1970/71 when I was first inspired by reading Marx and Rosa Luxemburg. This is a socialism which can only come from below and can only prevail by dismantling global capitalism. I remain a revolutionary in  the sense that I hold to the fundamental Marxist idea that only through the ‘self-emancipation’ of the mass of workers is there any hope for a different society.  Unfortunately right now revolution is not on the agenda, least of all in Britain, and it’s pointless to engage in rhetorical declamations of socialist intent if the masses are not listening. Instead we need to unite as many as possible around the defence of the NHS  and all the basic principles spelt out in the East London statement – and for the ‘resistance to austerity, cuts and war’ invoked in the final lines of the statement. For those reasons,  although I haven’t signed the left platform and would have preferred a different approach, I will vote for it rather than any of the alternatives.

As Mike Marqusee also notes, we already have a Socialist party and an SWP and a host of splinter groups  in the same milieu (some of them inside left unity, some of them not). History has  tested these groups, as it has the Labour Party, in the course of that protracted crisis of capitalism for which they were waiting so long, and they have been found wanting. It is time to renew the spirit of 1945 as best we can and try boldly to build something new on the left.

Pete Green

Hackney Left Unity