How should Left Unity organise

Philip Clayton and Kieran Crowe put forward their ideas

Since the rise of Thatcher, Reagan and the deification of Friedman and Hayek, in the late 70’s and 80’s, globalisation and neoliberalism has succeeded in smashing almost all the protection that workers had painfully gained through the struggles of the previous 100 years.

This cuts across everything: wage stagnation, the destruction of overtime payments, the massive increase in working hours, working unsocial hours, work breaks, the rise of short-term contracts, constant monitoring and evaluation, the increase in agency and temporary work, and the cult of the manager and the bullying it entails. Even the rise of internships has brought insecurity to large swathes of the middle class, even though they are best placed to bear it.

Underneath all this has been the destruction of stable and affordable housing that has left about six million people living in rented accommodation without any security. There has always been, and always will be, at least 30% of the population who can never afford to buy housing and whose needs have never been met by private housing provision and never will be.

This lack of affordable, secure housing is now the biggest driver of family breakdown, mental illness, drugs and alcohol addiction, educational failure, long-term unemployment, anti-social behaviour and, without any question, the huge rise in racist and anti-immigrant feelings, encouraged by a vicious government and feral media. The other tiny impact the housing shortage had was to fuel the financial bubble that swept the world and ended in the biggest financial crash since 1929.

No political party expresses any anger about this or has any intention of tackling this situation; their ‘policies’, particularly the Labour party’s, are risible and pathetic; more they are an insult. In the seventh richest country on the planet there is a simple question to ask: How rich do we have to be before there is no homelessness?

Add to this the massive scandals that have engulfed Parliament, the police, the press, the BBC and the banks and there is absolutely no doubt that millions of people are seething with anger, boiling with rage, as any conversation lasting more than a few minutes with almost anyone will confirm.

So why have we seen such a muted response to all this? There are several reasons, some obvious, some less so.

The obvious one is that once the miners were smashed the trade unions became cowed and their voice disappeared from the media. Unions have always been demonised but at one period what was said by their leaders mattered and had significance and this is no longer true. We hear constantly from the Institute of Directors, the CBI and the Adam Smith Institute who are always quoted prominently. The TUC hardly gets a word in. This has been reflected in the unions’ loss of members over the last 25 years.

Another is the demise of large industry sectors that brought people together in one space, people who often lived in the same areas as well. This allowed the building of a cohesion that has largely been obliterated. Trade Unions were not just about working conditions they were social organisations as well; they often had their own workingmen’s clubs (Not the name we’d use today.) and their own sports teams; through the apprenticeship system they not only taught skills and trades, they raised young people in a collective culture and taught social mores.

Even where unions do exist in some strength on paper, notably the public sector, their members are scattered in different offices and departments and often have very little communication with one another. What work communication does exist will be narrowly focused on work issues with very little opportunity to discuss a wider working class politics, as would have been the case in previous times.

Political parties have also seen huge collapses in membership that has turned them into husks of their former selves. They have become extremely unrepresentative, led by politicians who claim that they are representing millions of people, but who know nothing about the lives of most of them. This is particularly true of the Labour party.

Like the Trade Unions, the Labour party once also had a social as well as a political function, and this has declined even more. For example, they might well organise a rent strike against a local slum landlord, but they would also raise funds to take the residents of those slums on a day trip to the seaside or the countryside in an era when many may well have lived their entire lives within a radius of three or four miles.

One of the achievements of the post war Labour Party was to institute a nationwide system of national security, replacing the hodge podge of local bodies that previously existed, not least the hated poor law Guardians. Paradoxically, though, this has made it much harder to help people in trouble with those authorities, because there is nobody to confront on an individual basis. Creating a rational (in the Weberian sense) bureaucracy meant that it had become less susceptible to campaigning in the old way; now battles can only be fought in a legalistic manner.

This is not for one moment asserting that we can return to those early days (Who would wish to?) because, obviously, the conditions are not there anymore, but it joins up with one of the other big problems that modern capitalism has created for those who want to organise against it: the privatisation of leisure pursuits.

Pubs as community hubs have now virtually disappeared, whereas previously – from the war of the unstamped onwards – they played a critical role in providing meeting places for organised groups.  Similarly, the Methodist church movement played a huge part in the building of Labour and again churches in general have declined as community hubs.  It is difficult to see a church doing this again in our more secular and multicultural society.

The drive towards consolidation and monopoly that Marx so accurately predicted has lead to the destruction of all the old forms of mutuality that developed among the working and lower middle class as a bulwark against the ravages of capitalism. Those activities were carried out door to door because that was the only way they could be carried out, but it meant communication was carried out personally between individuals that connected as part of a greater collective good.

It is ironic that one of the most popular activities in modern society is video gaming, an activity that individuals pursue mainly in isolation, yet it is by definition a collective endeavour requiring collective industry by consumers and producers. The Internet has had a similar effect, along with mobile phones, and in one way is leading to the extreme alienation of traditional forms of communication, interaction and interpretation.

For example, while not always accurate, it was often possible to make a reasonable surmise of someone’s social and political outlook by observing the paper they read. Now people are often reading it on a tablet or phone and you have no idea of what they are reading. This is not important in itself, but an indication of the way we have changed. Our general point is that people now are more inward looking and, coupled with the general churn of people through the instability of housing and jobs, is another factor that means it is harder to create communities.

So how does a left party make space for itself? What can Left Unity do that is different from other groups that have been occupying the same theoretical space and who have existed for far longer without ever achieving the success they have so long predicted and hoped for, particularly since the economic crisis of recent years?

We would suggest other models. In Netherlands, the Socialist Party was once a tiny far left group, but has grown into the largest opposition party today. It started out with Maoist principles; but instead of the later Mao and the horror of the Cultural Revolution, they followed the example of the younger revolutionary who urged his followers to seek out practical struggles. This meant they became embroiled in people’s day to day problems and confrontations with local and national bureaucracies, and helped them get mundane things done, like drains unblocked, or house repairs carried out.

This is quite different from the agitation model of small far left groups in Britain today, but it is one with a track record of helping to organise dispossessed and alienated working class people. In Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein became the main party of oppressed working class Catholics by community organising. Perhaps more importantly the Black Panther Party built up black working class resistance to racism with their ‘serve the people’ strategy. It is also similar to the way that Islamist parties have displaced the left in many Middle Eastern countries through “Da’wa” (good work).

By concentrating on the things that mattered most to people in their immediate lives (and echoing Tip O’Neil’s dictum: “All politics is local.”) these organisations built a strong reputation for being on the side of the powerless and have translated this successfully into members, votes and organisation. While not having any illusions about Parliament as an instrument to overthrow capitalism, parties like the Dutch SP do not sneer at votes, because they recognise that it gives them a powerful voice that has to be listened to and because they can get support on the streets if necessary.

So it is necessary for Left Unity to campaign locally on local issues and help people with problems to fight them, through advocacy, physical support, publicity that can be self-generated and through building good contacts with local journalists. This is a slow process and with only small numbers of people and no finances to speak of we can only do what we can. (Take it from someone who has run cafés and restaurants, I can vouch that the best publicity of all is still word of mouth. PC)

A second lesson that urgently needs to be learned is how new media can be used to build political support. We should look at Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement that swept into local councils across Italy and in to the national Parliament, snatching the initiative from Italy’s once mighty communist movement.

Despite some reports, this was not an overnight sensation but a movement that was built up over four years; but it was done initially without any traditional media coverage and laid its grassroots via social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Ironically, the tools that have in one way created so much atomisation in society can also be used to bring isolated groups and individuals together. What is striking about their achievements is that they expressed the explosive anger that so many felt and translated that into physical bodies joining the crusade until a ‘tipping point’ was reached that created real consequences in the world. The left failed to deliver this in Italy and lost out as a result.

If Left Unity and the groups involved with it simply talk among themselves discussing how many Marxist Angels can dance on the head of a Leninist pin then we will fail before we have started. Left Unity must not become an echo chamber. We need to carry out campaigns that have real results for the people who most desperately need help and spread a message about making the world a better place as widely as possible.

The world was a better place within living memory, but so hegemonic has the idea become that ‘only’ capitalism and the ‘market’ provides the solution to everything that just to win back the concessions our forebears achieved is to become ‘revolutionary’.