How do we win reforms?

 Chris Strafford (Anticapitalist Initiative) discusses how we have won and lost reforms and the need for a long term project to rebuild the movement from below.

We live in a society of vast wealth, technology and scientific advances, yet billions still suffer in poverty, squalor and ignorance. The capitalist system has revolutionised the way we live, work, socialise and develop. In Britain, like many European states, we have won access to education, healthcare and some insurance against unemployment and sickness. The advances made after the second world war gave real hope that there would be no return to the dark days of the 1930s. They were won through the strength and determination of the working class and its organisations, which used campaigns of strikes, demonstrations and direct action. The capitalists also feared that the victory against fascism could develop into a victory against the system that birthed it. Where workers’ organisations in Europe took up factory occupations, held on to arms and continued the class struggle, the capitalists looked towards the social democrats and stalinists to bring about class peace and to rebuild capitalist economies shattered by the war. In Britain, Labour filled this role by legislating in parliament to introduce many of the key reforms demanded by workers.

The gains of the working class in the West during this period were linked to the wave of independence movements in colonies. A price had to be paid for these gains and improvements at home were paid by millions abroad. Whilst many colonies won formal independence from Britain, their resources, workers and land were left open to be “developed” and exploited by the British state and major firms. Movements in many of the former colonies were crushed to be replaced by compliant administrations or left to be reduced to poverty through capital flight and economic sabotage. Even now, there is a constant attempt to externalise the capitalist crisis away from the imperialist core with war and instability whilst looking for new ways to open up markets and access to resources.

The threat of mass action by workers kept the key gains of the welfare state, the National Health Service and comprehensive education, no go areas for the capitalists for almost 30 years. However, the capitalists had been biding their time and the collapse of the Callaghan government followed by three consecutive Conservative governments opened up opportunities for attack after attack. The capitalists could not abolish the gains in one go, so they have been stripping back protection and selling off slowly but consistently. The capitalists have been playing the long game. Just look at how the NHS is facing death by a thousand cuts. Everything that was won after the second world war is under threat, if it has not already disappeared. Chronic underfunding of services, the privatisation of nationalised interests, the weakening of trade union rights and the re-organisation of work left the field open for the last two governments to seriously undermine the welfare state and the popular support it enjoyed. “Benefits scroungers” are pitted against the “deserving poor”, single mothers and the sick against “tax payers” and constant attacks on the welfare state are legitimised by the argument that the government is “making work pay”. Never is it mentioned that millions in work now rely on social security or charity to just feed, clothe and house themselves and their families.

Take free school meals for example: in 1944, all schools were obliged to provide free school meals for all children, but slowly the provision was undermined and in 1980, Local Education Authorities were relieved of their obligation to provide them all together. The current Conservative-led government is going much further and is seeking to “deprive at least 168,000 poverty-stricken children of their free school lunches”. Another reform we have won and lost in the last 60 years is the right to a decent home, built, maintained and guaranteed by society and administered by local councils. In the post-war period of reconstruction, all governments were committed to building council housing, though as time went on it was done on the cheap and often not very well maintained. The Kirkby Rent Strike in 1972 demonstrated the disgusting housing that was being provided for workers. It was no wonder that when Thatcher brought in the right to buy council houses that many people jumped at the chance. As ever, this was a long-term strategy by the capitalists to undermine housing provision. Now, it is few and far between, of poor quality and with private landlords making massive profits through high rents, while thousands are stuck on waiting lists or in their parents homes.

The movement, such as it exists, is largely engaged in innumerable defensive actions with activists spread far too thin. Where once we may have counted on trade unions or Labour councils to offer up some sort of defence, we have only witnessed token resistance from the former and active participation in the attacks by the latter. Even the party occupying the space to the left of Labour, the Green Party, has been actively implementing the government’s austerity agenda: mirroring the collaboration in cuts that the so-called new left parties like Die Linke in Germany and the Red Green Alliance in Denmark have taken part in.

Our response has been fractured and at times farcical. The People’s Assembly gave us a glimpse of what a united movement might be able to achieve but it was undermined by its failure to criticise the Labour and trade union bureaucracy effectively. Instead of listening to the likes of Len McCluskey and Frances O’Grady, would it not have been far more useful to hear from workers actually engaged in the resistance like those fighting blacklisting, poverty pay or the closure of a hospital? Beyond a few big marches, we will not get any kind of real action called by those at the top of the TUC and Labour, which means we must base our approach on building confidence and action from below. As Tim Nelson rightly argues in his recent piece, we ‘should not be a party which simply presents itself as an alternative leadership to the left of Labour – “follow us not them”- but instead should be a party which encourages, and bases itself upon, the self-activity of the working class.’ Practically, as Mark Boothroyd has suggested, this must translate into building a party that ‘seeks to expose the gaping holes which exist in the welfare state and capitalism’s provision for people, and propose some ideas for how the socialist movement can create organisations to fill these gaps, as a necessary part of the struggle to change the entire system of capitalism.’

We should also have a similar understanding of how we win reforms. Unless there is a movement on the streets that develops political organisations and activity independent of the bureaucracy and the state, defensive actions will lose 9 times out of 10 with any positive reforms practically impossible. Our new party has to put itself at the heart of resistance and build up support over a long period of time. As Dave Renton recently wrote, this will require ‘recognising that any serious trade union work just takes lots and lots of time. It is all about identifying the space which is right for you, and then working there consistently, whether that is as a rep, or as someone standing outside the workplace with some leaflets and a collecting tin. There are no short cuts.’

Historically, the most radical reforms and commitments from the bureaucracy have come at times when our movement has been strongest. It is no coincidence that the Labour Party’s old Clause IV was adopted in 1918 during the revolutionary wave rushing out of Russia. Often reforms are an attempt to buy off a movement taking their demands further. If we want to win reforms, and I suggest that we must fight for even the smallest improvement in living conditions, then the best way to do so is for our movement to be a real threat against the power of the capitalists. That means our primary focus for building a new party should be our communities, campuses and workplaces. To earn the support of thousands and one day millions, we need to become a consistent thread of solidarity and action within the movement.

The left stands at a crossroads with no way of turning around. We have worked at building the small left sect, worked away at trying to capture the Labour Party and seen the demoralisation of thousands through defeat after defeat. We have also witnessed the emergence of new movements, new ideas and new centres of revolutionary action across the world. Occupy, Los Indignados, the popular movements in South America, the movements in North Africa and the Middle East and the resistance of Greek workers on the frontline of austerity all have lessons for us. Our new party must be able to pull together the widest number of workers in opposition to austerity and it must find a way of doing this whilst having a commitment to overthrowing capitalism because until then, none of the reforms we win will ever be safe. The approach supported by Rosa Luxemburg can still inform our party building today:

‘On the one hand, we have the mass; on the other, its historic goal, located outside of existing society. On one hand, we have the day-to-day struggle; on the other, the social revolution. Such are the terms of the dialectic contradiction through which the socialist movement makes its way.

It follows that this movement can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the two dangers by which it is constantly being threatened. One is the loss of its mass character; the other, the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to the condition of a sect; the other, the danger of becoming a movement of bourgeois social reform.’