I share this post in the interest of honest and comradely discussions around political issues. I am personally familiar with the authors of both pieces and the organizations concerned and have a great deal respect for their opinions, and their dedication to the workers’ movement. Intense debate is taking place around the future of the British Labor Party since the ouster of Jeremy Corbyn and the leadership of the right winger Keir Starmer as this and the previous post on the subject shows. Richard Mellor Admin
Starmer Praises Thatcher. Image not with original article source
Labour’s Coming Split
Roger Silverman
London UK
Workers’ International Network
04-03-24
I’m writing in response to your piece Owen Jones is wrong to leave the Labour Party, reprinted from the journal Left Horizons. I’m afraid that these comrades are living in a bygone era; they are just about the only people left that still cling to illusions in the prospect of a future left opposition arising in the Labour Party. Their article could have been written in 1964; but history has moved on since then.
Labour under Starmer is a very different party from that of the Wilson era. Like all Labour leaders prior to the arrival of Blair’s “New Labour” in 1994, Wilson balanced and wobbled between the trade unions and big business. Labour was fundamentally a working-class party, organically based upon the trade unions but led by careerists only too ready to knuckle under to the pressures of capitalism. Starmer has systematically and relentlessly driven out the left in a mass purge. He is promoting Labour as “the party of business” and boasting of an openly Tory programme. He is bidding – with some success – to convince the ruling class that Labour has a better claim to become the party of mainstream capitalism, rather than the increasingly demagogic populist far-right Tory party. And business donations are pouring into his party’s coffers.
But as a voice of the working class, the Labour Party today is bleeding to death. Starmer was planted at its head for one sole purpose: to destroy it; to appease a ruling class which was panic-stricken by the massive surge of support for the now expelled former left leader Jeremy Corbyn. He has carried through the takeover systematically and methodically. He has even banned MPs from joining picket lines; to appreciate what that means, remember that in the 1970s serving Labour cabinet ministers stood on the picket line of the notorious union-busting company Grunwicks – even Shirley Williams, who soon afterwards split from Labour to form the ill-fated Social-Democratic Party.
Stalin himself would have been lost in admiration at the thoroughness of Starmer’s purge; even he felt the need to stage at least sham token show trials of his victims before executing them. Before their expulsion in 1983, the Militant editorial board had the right to appeal against it directly to the entire Labour Party conference. And each one of the rebel Liverpool councillors had the right to defend themselves in person to the National Executive. In contrast, Starmer’s justice comes straight from Alice in Wonderland – or better still, from Kafka.
Given the universal hatred for the Tory party, Starmer will probably win the next election, in an “unpopularity contest”, on a low poll, with record votes for assorted “none-of-the-above” parties. After a miserable period in office, the Labour Party will then slide into oblivion, like the socialist parties of France (which won 1.7% in the recent presidential elections); Sweden, on its lowest vote for a century; Germany, now overtaken by the racist AfD; Norway, Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands, now Portugal… and soon Spain (not to mention the Communist Party of Italy). As in the rest of Europe, the danger is that Starmer’s weak government will be succeeded by an even uglier far-right regime – a fusion of the dominant clique in the Tory party with the so-called Reform Party.
If there was ever a need for a genuine party of labour, it is now. There’s a real thirst for one. How do we know? From the surge of hundreds of thousands into the Labour Party when Corbyn was leader; from the four million new votes gained in the 2017 election. The test of a party’s popularity is how many people vote for it. And, despite the constant repetition that the 2019 election was “Labour’s worst result for 80 years”, the fact is that even in 2019 Labour under Corbyn still won more votes than in 2015 under Miliband, 2010 under Brown, and even 2005 under Blair – when Labour won!
So where are these hundreds of thousands of former party activists, and these millions of Corbyn voters? Why is there no mass socialist party today? Because of the paralysis of the Labour parliamentary left, which is stuck in a time warp. No one nowadays can keep up the myth that Labour is a “broad church”, with even the pretence of a common objective, and with differences only on details of finer tuning and timing.
The frayed strings still just about linking the unions to Labour will inevitably be snapped amid the upheavals that lie ahead. And let’s remember that most of the unions recently on the front line of struggle – the teachers, the nurses, the doctors, the railway workers – are not affiliated to the Labour Party even now. They will be at the forefront of efforts to gain political representation by their own initiative. The task for socialists today is to mobilise the millions of defranchised trade unionists and youth behind a campaign for a mass workers’ party.
For more information, please see my pamphlet Labour’s Coming Split at https://www.workersinternationalnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Labours-Coming-Split-by-Roger-Silverman.pdf
2 comments:
I will not reply to all of the points Roger has made in his article, because many of Left Horizons arguments about the Labour Party are in published articles, including the editorial which he mentioned. He has not taken up the issues raised in the editorial, noting instead, that the editorial “could have been written in 1964.” Read it, no it could not. But while we’re on history, ultra-left groups have been writing off the Labour Party and trying to build a ‘new party of labour’ for a lot longer than that, and they have all failed.
Roger unfortunately makes the mistake that many on the left make – they confuse the leading elements of the Labour Party (the parliamentarians and the apparatus) with what the Party represents (and yes, still today) as a mass, social organisation, resting on a large membership (still roughly twice what it was before Corbyn became leader) and millions of affiliated trade union members. Amazingly, he only mentions the trade unions twice, both times in a historical context. Yet the main thrust of the editorial was that we have a perspective of the trade union membership being the dynamo of a new left in the Party when they move into opposition to Starmer, under a Labour government.
The gist of Roger’s argument is that it is ‘impossible’ to build a new left ever again inside the Labour Party. He accuses Left Horizons supporters as being “just about the only people left that still cling to illusions in the prospect of a future left opposition”. Yet why is there no mass socialist party on the left of Labour? Roger has answered that himself, in a FB post in February. It is, he wrote, “because of the paralysis of the Labour left”.
So this Labour left, is apparently still large and significant enough to block another party from being formed. But you can’t have it both ways. Either there is no room for a left in the Labour Party ever again OR, the Labour left is still so significant that it blocks the formation of a new party. You can’t hold both positions at the same time, although Roger appears to.
There WILL be a split in the Labour Party at some point in the future – we have said as much, many times. No doubt then, like a man with a broken clock, Roger will claim he had been “right all along”. But the point is that it is not happening yet; nor is it likely even in the foreseeable future. We will know when that time comes.
John Pickard, on behalf of Left Horizons
Since I presume that John would not knowingly misrepresent my position, I can only charitably assume that he has grossly misunderstood it.
He claims that I consider the official "left" of the parliamentary Labour Party - the so-called "Socialist Campaign Group" - apparently "so large and significant that it blocks the formation of a new party". This is a ridiculous misconception. This so-called "left" is neither large nor significant; it is completely and utterly invisible! It has uttered not a squeak of protest at the expulsion of its former leader Corbyn, or of Diane Abbott and other MPs, let alone of literally thousands of rank-and-file members. If Corbyn had mobilised the hundreds of thousands of supporters who had poured into the party to support him, rather than constantly appeasing the right-wing witch-hunters, it might have been a different story. Instead he and his allies capitulated again and again, with the result that the membership has drained away and all that is left of the party today is an empty shell populated almost exclusively by would-be careerists. .
John pins his hopes on a future revival of the left within the party coming from the trade unions; but the complete suppression of democratic rights within the party gives them no outlet for debate. Starmer has completed the counter-revolution launched by Blair in the New Labour era; it is no longer the political voice of the trade unions, albeit deeply warped and corrputed, but an alternative party of the ruling class, with an impotent tail of affiliated organisations trailing along pathetically behind it by default. That's why big business are enthusiastically pouring lavish donations into its coffers.
In 1900, when the elementary right to strike came under attack from the politicians to which the trade unions were then affiliated, they made a decisive break, severed their links with the Liberal Party and established the Labour Representation Committee which soon became the Labour Party. We are in exactly the same position today. The only difference is that Lloyd George and Company were incomparably more radical than Sir Keir Starmer today.
A new generation of militant activists is beginning to challenge the top union mandarins and demand a political fightback. Already up and down the country constituency parties have been shut down; hundreds of local councillors and even some prospective mayoral and parliamentary candidates have split from Labour; and so far one trade union (the bakers) has disaffiliated. Under a Starmer government this preliminary trickle will inevitably turn into a flood. A genuine mass party of labour is about to be born; and those too timid to do more than cling to Starmer's rotting structure will find themselves isolated from the political reawakening of the working class.
Roger Silverman
Workers' International Network
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