Another way for discussion

“If you keep on doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep on getting what you’ve always got”.

The launch of Left Unity started a process that has needed to happen for a long time, say Rachel Archer and Josh Davies. The left is weak and lacks influence to challenge austerity, much less pose a meaningful alternative. The Labour Party is right wing, union leaders dodge key fights and the campaigns of the last decade have largely come and gone without building any real roots. Whilst the situation seems grim there is also a feeling of the left needing to do something different and learn from its mistakes. Left Unity offers one of the ways we can begin to do this with the potential to bring many people into that process.

If we want to reverse the trend of the left’s recent history then we need to be aware of the scale of the tasks we have in front of us. Building roots in communities, providing a politics and way of working attractive and engaging to people, organising precarious workers, reversing rampant privatisation and bring about a cultural change whereby political engagement is part of people’s every day lives. Of course doing all of this will be a slow process and we shouldn’t expect quick fixes and Left Unity is only a part of this process.

What we want to see with Left Unity is something different from the failed and disengaging projects of the past. We want Left Unity to provide a space for those to the left of Labour but to do it in such a way as to offer a genuine alternative to what politics and political involvement currently looks like, one where our methods of working- how we actually do politics- are at the centre of our politics. The current debate over platforms seems to miss this point and we wish to move the debate forward, putting participation at its centre.

The recent decision that Left Unity’s November conference should discuss policies and platform should, on the one hand be welcomed, but also, be met with some caution. The three different platforms that have emerged as discussion pieces, and will inevitably be voted on, share many qualities, although indeed the next few months political differences that exist within Left Unity will be stratified around these documents. The differences are of course real, and the various support for each platform represents something of a pie chart of the British left. Unfortunately their main similarity is the same bad habit of all Left groups and labour organisations of the past: they are all pre-written documents, created by seasoned activists- all with the best intentions- given to a delegation to vote on, then to be wheeled out to the working class. This is a fundamental bad habit we have to break. The question then, can we do it differently?

It must be said that all three documents have worthwhile ideas and policies. The Class Struggle Platform argues the importance of rank and file organisation within the union movement to keep bureaucrats to account. This is critically important, with strike after strike being sold out. The union leaders have absolutely no idea about the reality of the members they represent, if they did they would not sell strikes off. This is a hard argument to take to a broad organisation, and they should be commended for the relentless rhetoric that argues for forms of working class organisation free from bureaucratic control.

Similarly, the Socialist Platform is asserting that in fact, we need socialism. Indeed, to avoid making the mistakes of the past, where socialists hid their true politics in order to attract popular support. The explicit attack on capitalism (as compared to just austerity) is an important argument. The austerity project is part of a wider, international capitalist attack on the working class. It recognises that it is socialism that is needed to defeat capitalism, and socialists should not be afraid of saying they are socialists.

The Left Platform policy, although very different to the other two, has great merits. It broadness, under attack by many, ensures that even if program/platform/policy is adopted at the November conference, it is open enough to still be developed. Its explicit nod to feminists, environmentalists and social justice activists make it an attractive platform. Although it is different in some respects, it is the same in other ways.

All three platforms are pre-written documents, and fall into the trap of producing a potential programme that has a track record of failure. The Class Struggle Platform, indeed argues for what is necessary, but is another incarnation of the continued theoretical work obsessed with the transitional program. Although transitional demands will be need to be made, it is presumptuous that they can be asserted now. Given the opportunity, might the class think they have different demands that are more transitional?

The Socialist Platform represents a very limited programme, and is again presumptuous. The argument for socialism needs to be won, through real life experience and education.

The Left Party platform models itself on the left parties of Europe, such as Front de Gauche and Syrizia. Alas these models, although potentially electorally successful, haven’t proven to be successful enough to seriously act as an barrier to austerity. As it goes, austerity continues to tear through France, and especially Greece. Is this the party we want? Superficially success, but in fact, unable to stop the brutality of capitalism?

Indeed, the big mistake that Left Unity is making in the November conference is allowing it to continue down the same road the left has allowed itself to go down before. It is a wasted opportunity to call a national conference where pre-written documents are discussed, amended, debated and then voted on. For the many, many people that have gotten involved in Left Unity, from Cornwall to Aberdeen, this will either be a) off putting b) alienating. A program of intent of course needs to emerge, but we should not be so impatient as to allow it to be prescribed.

 Why not try something different? Rather than a conference based on the model we’ve inherited from the labour unions, whereby documents are given, Left Unity would be wise to design and facilitate a conference where ideas, priorities and demands emerge from a day’s discussion. Perhaps the most perfect programme won’t emerge that day, perhaps more work would need to be done. But wouldn’t it be worth a try? This is what we mean by participatory politics: where the forms of political discussion model the content. The way that we do our political activity is our politics. Many have argued that ‘this is the best way of doing it we’ve got’, but that fails to use political imagination. There are many ways to do politics, some of these ways have not even been imagined yet.

The point of a programme is that it can, eventually, lead to the working class to power. Who better then decide what is needed then the class? Programme should not be given, it should be something that necessarily emerges out of political engagement.