“Left unity and Class Politics” by Ian Donovan

This is a contribution to the debate about the results of the European and local elections by Ian Donovan.

The analysis of the Euro Elections by Salma Yaqoob (Statement on the euro-election results, 8th June), makes a number of pertinent observations about the reasons for the disaster of the BNP’s winning two seats in the European Parliament.

One point she gets right is that “Labour is wholly to blame for its own crisis and has to take a large share of the responsibility for creating the conditions in which the far right is growing.” Many of the other things she says about the impact of the recession on working class people, about the attacks of the Labour government, the demoralisation which these are inflicting, and the danger that this can drive people into the arms of the far right, are correct.

Yet the political perspective she puts forward as a solution to this situation is badly flawed. Salma is advocating an alliance of ‘progressive’ forces to block the advance of the far right, centred on the Green Party and soft-left elements in Compass. This block assembles forces that are incapable of putting forward, or hostile to, the kind of working class politics that is needed to roll back the encroachment of the fascists in traditionally strong centres of the labour movement such as Yorkshire and the North West. The alliance of liberal, middle class forces she advocates will not stop the BNP; their aims and ideologies will not be attractive in the main to working class people alienated by New Labour whose alientation is fundamentally driven by economic hardship and class anger, which the BNP aims to exploit and misdirect against scapegoats such as immigrants and refugees.

Salma writes: “The broad left must work together, irrespective of party affiliation, to maximise the impact of the progressive vote at the next General Election.” This is wrong, and will not undermine the BNP because the question of a new party, separate from New Labour that will stand up for workers against the Labour government and all its neo-liberal attacks, is central to politically cutting the ground from under the BNP. We do not need a ‘broad left … irrespective of party affiliation’, we need a new broad party of the working-class left that puts class politics at the centre of its perspective. The alliance she is proposing is a cross-class alliance of Respect with the Green Party, and Compass and other soft-lefts.

The Green Party does not, in its ideology, appeal to workers as a class. It does have paper policies on a number of questions that are progressive and would benefit workers, such as opposition to privatisation and anti-union laws, but its central appeal is to people of all classes who want to stop climate change and save the planet for future generations. It has people in it who are sympathetic to workers struggles, but there is also a significant element who see the growth of the human population, and hence mainly of the working class and the poor, as one of the central causes of environmental degradation.

A recent YouGov survey taken between 29th May and 4th June – just before the European Elections took place – is very revealing about the class character of the Green Party’s support. The survey showed that in terms of social grade or occupation, the Green Party’s intended voters had the highest percentage – 64% – of those with a high income (grade ABC1) of all the major parties. That is, of professional people and the like. It also had the lowest percentage of those surveyed in social grade C2DE (36%) – which is predominantly composed of unskilled manual workers.

Conversely, the BNP has the lowest percentage of those in social grade ABC1 – 39%, and the highest percentage in social grade C2DE – 61% of all the major parties.

This is fairly indicative of the reason why it is an illusory idea that the Green Party can be the vehicle for undermining the potential appeal of the BNP to disillusioned working class voters. The Green Party, ‘progressive’ policies notwithstanding, appeals in the main to a middle class, not a working class, constituency, and because of that there is a real social gulf between its base of support and the kinds of alienated working class people, impoverished by the recession, that are in some cases being driven towards the BNP. It will take a completely different kind of politics, which centres its appeal on defending working class interests, to undercut the demagogy of the BNP and undermine this potential base of support.

Compass also is a middle class force. It is the loyal opposition within New Labour, and its left-wing criticisms of Blair and Gordon Brown do not go very far at all. As an example of this, on one key question of importance to working class people above all it showed its true colours. On the question of the housing crisis at its conference on 13 June, it failed to invite a speaker from Defend Council Housing – a campaign that does exactly what it says on the tin – in favour of a speaker from Shelter, the homelessness charity, which is fairly close to the government and places much store in promoting home ownership and first time buyers, and working with Housing Associations and other ‘social landlords’ who are in fact thinly-disguised private-sector organisations. Council Housing is not high on its ‘realistic’ agenda.

At the conference those attending were regaled by the likes of Harriet Harman and Liberal Democrat MPs, as well as the more hesitant, softer left trade union leaders like Billy Hayes. Also speaking was Caroline Lucas, the Green MEP who herself previously made clear her own middle class politics by saying that she equally opposes politics being at the behest of big business or the trade unions. Salma thus gives her credibility as an anti-war activist and Respect councillor to this gathering whose whole thrust is all-inclusive, classless politics hostile to independent working class political activity. This is seriously mistaken.

Compass itself has proved spineless in the face of pressure from the Labour leadership, including on issues that are close to Salma’s heart such as the Iraq War and the ‘war on terror’. Its main figures, most notably Jon Cruddas, supported the Iraq war and only belatedly decided they had been mistaken on this when the allies got bogged down and Bush/Blair’s political justifications were completely discredited. And then there is Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith’s ill-fated proposals for 42 days detention without charge. Jon Cruddas and co showed their true colours by voting for that in parliament. Most recently, Cruddas was seen denouncing those supporters of Unite Against Fascism who chucked eggs at BNP leader and fascist MEP Nick Griffin outside Parliament and disrupted his press conference.

Salma writes that “The challenge for the left is to renew itself and reassert some basic socialist critiques and solutions into mainstream political debate.” It is certainly positive to see a call for socialist politics as a road forward. But the vehicle for socialist politics is the working class; the perspective of Compass, Ken Livingstone’s Progressive London, the Greens etc is not to found a new party to fight for the independent interests of our class but rather to construct multi-class alliances, either for elections or for pressure politics between elections.

The prime example of this kind of politics in practice was Ken Livingstone’s London Mayorality from 2000 to 2008, which came to include Liberals and Greens as part of a ‘progressive’ administration. Which as everyone knows, notwithstanding the Mayor’s refusal to buckle to Islamophobia, involved systematic concessions to the City, and such disgraceful actions as the Mayor calling on workers to scab on tube strikes. These incompatible and often treacherous political forces will never be a vehicle for socialism or anything like it – the best they will ever produce is something like Ken Livingstone’s administration.

This is totally ineffective as a perspective to combat BNP influence on working class people … the concessions Livingstone made to business, and even more the left cover he gave to New Labour, also helped undermine the left and in fact played an important role in paving the way for the BNP’s previous election gain of a representative on the GLA. It was correct to support Livingstone when he broke from Labour in 2000 to campaign against tube privatisation, and correct to defend his idiosyncratic left-talking administration against the Tory challenge of Boris Johnson in 2008 – though the difference between Livingstone and Johnson has not so far been as marked as predicted – but to put forward Livingstone’s London as a model of ‘socialist’ solutions, as this perspective implies, undermines and demobilises the radical potential to advance working class politics that Respect originally had in it.

Finally, Salma’s criticism of No2EU and the SLP cannot go unanswered. She implies that simply by standing and refusing to unite behind the Green candidate in North West England, they allowed the BNP to win a seat for Nick Griffin. It is a conceit of the Greens’ that in this area at least, they were the barrier to the BNP gaining a seat. Yet the figures don’t add up. Salma points at the fact that the Greens fell behind Griffin by around 5000 votes, and laments that if only a small fraction of the combined No2EU and SLP vote of around 50,000 had gone to the Greens, Peter Cranie and not Griffin would have been in the European Parliament. Yet hundreds of thousands of votes were lost to the main parties in the same region – particularly to Labour.

The Green challenge was well known and long prepared. Why focus on the relatively few votes of the two working class campaigns, which were in a weak position in this election for well-known reasons, and yet fail to explain why the Greens did not have the ability to win over the necessary votes from among these many more thousands of disillusioned Labour supporters particularly? This, I think, says something about the class nature of the Greens as explored above. The allegation that simply by standing, the weak working class groupings were responsible for the BNP advance sounds like making an excuse for the inability of the long-established Greens to attract those many more from Labour they might have been expected to.

Salma’s statement, while aiming to promote what she sees as left unity, is in fact promoting something that is non-working-class in its content, and really involves middle class forces lording it over the workers. The shrill tone of various ‘left’ Greens in ‘condemning’ a workers organisation, the RMT, for initiating a left-wing ticket for the Euro elections, reflected sheer middle class arrogance and hardly a democratic spirit either. No wonder the Greens failed to win over disillusioned working class support from Labour – many of whom detest the BNP but failed to vote at all. To mobilise these people politically, a working class party and clearly working class politics are necessary. That is the only kind of ‘progressive’ politics that can be effective on this political terrain. We need unity of the working class left, and that is what leading Respect figures like Salma should be putting their energy into building, not promoting a form of cross-class politics that for all its pretensions, can never be truly socially progressive.

Who defended the RMT on the Greater London Assembly?

On 10 June the Tories submitted a motion to a full meeting of the Greater London Assembly condemning the strike by the RMT then taking place.

Val shawcross, Labour member of the assembly for Lambeth and Southwark moved an amendment to this motion.

Not one which defended the strike, but one which criticised the Mayor, boris Johnson, for not being out there sufficiently and sharing the inconvience.

On the strike itself she was falling over herself to join the condemnation of it.

Even against a Tory mayor the Labour party cannot bring itself to back a strike. Strikes are bad, period. And those who still think that they might be useful to defend workers’ living standards, well they are should be treated like naughty children.

She compared favourably Ken Livingstone’s previous administration (still lauded by some as the acme of progressive politics) to Boris’s: “Ken Livingstone was always very clear to the unions, from early on, before there were any difficulties, that… he would never reward bad behaviour… offers were never improved after strike ballots begun”

So there you have it. Not only striking, just having a ballot is no longer acceptable to New Labour.

Just in case we may not have grasped their position on the strike she had to ram it home “We are extremely unhappy with this strike and we are extremely unhappy with the RMT”

This flow of denunciation was then joined by Caroline Pigeon, a Lib Dem assembly member and a councillor for Southwark’s Newington Ward.

Richard Barnbrook attacked the strike too, apparently “Crow has no allegiance to democracy”, which is rich coming from the BNP.

So Jenny Jones, a Green Party member of the the assembly, and a councillor in Southwark, had the floor clear to be the left opposition. And this is what she said:

“I do come from an Old Labour family, I don’t know that I have confessed that before, so I do have a slight sympathy for unions, because I think they have had a bad press since the days of Thatchr.

My dad was a union member all his life, a loyal union member, but he was never called out on strike, he was never tested in that way, because unions do obviously have a role, they are expected to protect the rights of workers to protect pay and conditions, for working people.

But what I have actually realised from reading all the stuff I’ve been able to on this on this particular strike, I just don’t know what happened. I just don’t know.
I’m sure TFL worked really hard to prevent the strike. I’m even sure the Mayor did his bit, I disagree with John [Biggs, Labour member for City and East] that the Mayor hasn’t shown any leadership, this strike has made the Mayor look good.

And I really resent that. You know, that shouldn’t have happened. You know massive disruption for millions of Londoners, huge costs to the economy, and to people who had to find other more expensive ways of getting into work, and in addition the Mayor looks good.

He’s out and about, he’s taking river transport, he’s cycling, and he’s being tough on the radio, it’s a disaster, an absolute disaster.

It was probably right to bring this motion, but you know, its tacky, a political move, I just can’t be bothered with this sort of political move. You’re not really taking into account the fact that Mayor over the last year probably has not done his bit. And so I’m going to abstain on this.

I think you are possibly right to bring the motion [addressed to the Tory members], but if you had worded it in a different way, I would have supported it wholeheartedly, but I’m not going to support it as it is.”

Jenny Jones abstained in the vote.

The video of the whole session of the Asembly is available at the GLA webcast page here.

The debate on the Tory motion condemning the strike starts at 1 hour 52. It makes interesting viewing and tells you a lot about how total the political consensus is now.

Val Shacross’s speech starts at 1 hour 27 mins.

Jenny Jones speech starts at 2 hours 4 mins in.

Bob Crow speaks out about Europe (and says a number of other things)

From a two page interview with Bob Crow in Saturday’s The Guardian:

“Crow’s politics are fascinating. He is an internationalist who recently stood in the European elections on an anti-EU ticket as part of a trade union coalition. As far as he’s concerned, the EU is a capitalist conspiracy to bring wage rates down. Does that mean at heart he is a little Englander? Christ no, he says. He doesn’t care where his workers come from so long as they’re being paid a fair rate. “People think we’re wrapping ourselves up in the union jack, but I have got more in common with a Chinese labourer than I have with Sir Fred Goodwin. I’m anti-EU, but I’m pro-European. Real European support for me means when French dockers take action in Calais, we back it.”

To read the rest click here

What do the Euro elections tell us?

The most striking event of the evening was the gaining of two seats by the BNP and the persistence of the UKIP.

The BNP increased its vote 808,200(6.3%) to 943,598. They also won tow MEPS. Nick Griffin in the North West and Andrew Brons.

This is a great success for the BNP.

It isn’t necessarily the breakthrough they wanted.

The collapse of Labour and the BNP

London the BNP vote increased to 86,000 from 76,000.

52,000 form 50,000 in the NE,

In the NW it actually dropped from 134,000 to 132,000 (8%, a 1.6 point rise on a lower turnout).

The Greens who positioned themselves as the way to stop the BNP increased their vote from 117,00 20 127,000, 5,000 votes behind the BNP.

The main reason that the BNP were able to win a seat though was not that the Greens failed to bridge the gap to the last seat but the extraordinary fall in turnout and the collapse of the Labour vote.

It is noticeable that in Yorkshire and Humberside the situation was not dissimilar.

Here turnout went down from a relatively respectable 42.6% turnout for a Euro election in 2004 with 1,573,000 voting to 32.3% or 1,226,000, a drop of 347,000 or 20%.

Once again the Tory vote dropped in absolute terms by 88,000 from 387,000 to 299,000, a 22% more or less in line with the decline in turnout.

Like wise UKIP dropped from 228,000 to 213,000 a 6.5% drop, a rise compared to the fall in turnout.

The Lib Dems were dropped 83,000, a 34% drop, well a head of the decline in turnout.

The Labour vote fell by 183,000 from 413,000 to 230,000, a massive 44% drop.

Rather than go to other parties again much of the Labour vote simply seems to have stayed at home, as does a large part of the other two parties votes. The smaller parties, UKIP, BNP and the Greens maintained there vote, which meant most of the people a who had previously, voted for them turned out and some who would have voted for other parties, or had stayed at home.

Clearly in the North West the most popular choice was abstention with the Labour parties voters staying at home in the greatest numbers. The BNP and Greens managed to mobilise their voters or win some new ones. But in absolute terms the e gains are modest. Especially when considering the number of voters rejecting the mainstream parties.

The turnout dropped by 400,000 from 2,115,000 to 165,000. The labour vote fell in absolute terms form 576,000, 423,000 a drop of 153,000 or a 26% decline.

The Tories managed to go up 1.5 points, but in absolute terms their vote declined form 509 to 403. The Lib Dems actually dropped 1.6 points to 14.3 from 335,000.

In the South East however a mere 1.4 point rise disguises a rise from 65,000 to 102,000. It might be worth noting that Labour in the south East lost a third of its vote, dropping from 301,000 to 192,000. The other big gainer there was the Greens lifting their vote form 173,000 to 571,000. The Tories went up to 812,000 from 176,000. UKIP up to 440,000 from 431.

In the West Midlands the BNP increased to 121,000 from 107,000.

The minor parties, the BNP included, have not made a great breakthrough, despite the opportunity presented to them by the scandals crisis and the recession.

The increases in the vote have generally been moderate, or they have actually seen their vote shrink.

The strength of these parties seems to be in large part negative. The strength is merely the electoral manifestation of the major parties weaknesses.

The BNP have made a breakthrough of a kind at these elections in getting Nick Griffin elected.

The most salient feature of the BNP’s vote, apart form its failure to grow in any major way is its resilience. Though still in terms of mainstream politics the BNP is still not playing in the major league. It is however starting to move out of the realms of protest vote party becoming a fixture on the political landscape with a widely known leader and profile. It can also put up a decent showing in other elections, something UKIP for instance is not able to do.

If UKIP is a seasonal, the BNP is starting to look like a hardy perennial.

The BNP seems to have established itself a fairly stable voting base, which is not just made up of hard-core racists, but it has not managed to establish itself as a semi-respectable part of the political landscape.

The gaining of two MEPs, and the position that this gives them can help this process.

The Greens

Much has been based on the idea in the NW for instance that the Greens are the best placed party to stop the BNP. A vote for the Green Party was posited as a vote to keep the BNP leader Nick Griffin out.

This may have succeeded (though it didn’t in this election). But can the Greens pose an alternative that can block the BNP in the longer term?

In three regions the Greens were cited as the way to stop the BNP. The Greens themselves have cited this as a reason that other to the left of Labour Parties should stand aside as a split in the ”progressive” vote would let the Nazis. The problem is that as long as the present system is used in Euro elections the this may always be the choice.

Like the BNP under New Labour ht Greens have not managed to grow greatly in terms of membership, but they have built up an electoral base for themselves.

To take an example of London:

2009 euros: 190,000 (11%)
2004 euros: 158,000 (6.4%)
2004 GLA: 138, (8%)
2000 GLA: 183,000 (11%)
1999 euros: 87,000 (8%)

Or in the NW:

2009 euros: 127,000 (8%)
2004 euros: 117,393 (6%)
1999 euros: 56,000 (6%)

In this time the BNP has continued to spread its influence, in Lancashire and in the suburbs of London.

The Green Party has not been any kind of block, it has not provided any kind of alternative pole of attraction in working class communities (though individual Green councillors have in a few places done this)

This has to be born in mind when thinking about stopping the BNP.

The BNP has established itself.

The BNP has an attraction to working class people as they peel away from generations of supporting labour.

The Greens are not capable of filling that vacuum and creating a pole of attraction in working class communities. Only a new party based on the most active sections of the working class and a section of the trade unions at least can do this.

The Left

It was not a good night for the left. A the moment when the political system is going through a crisis of legitimacy, at the same time as Labour government and New Labour disintegrate and the world economy is gripped by the greatest crisis of capitalism for 30 years, the left has found itself almost devoid of a serviceable electoral vehicle.

Respect was unable to stand. Its straightened circumstances since the spit meant that this was never going to be the case. Nor was the party able to through itself behind a single force.

The only other electoral forces of the left were the SLP and No2EU (this is not to include the Green Party at this point). It should be noted that NO2EU was a temporary electoral platform and the SLP had not previously stood nationally.

The SLP took 173,00 or 1.1% and NO2EU 153,000 (1%). The SSP took 10,000.

Together they took 294,000 votes in England and Wales and 42,000 in Scotland.

Considering the scale of the political and economic crisis it seems a paltry result. In many ways the left seems further away from a viable force to the left of Labour than it was ten years ago when the LSA contested the GLA elections.

In having the two parties of the left in England a temporary platform only created in the spring, and the SLP, one might have expected a complete car crash.

However many who will be quick to criticise the failure of the left should look at the statistics.

The 294,000 votes the SLP and NO2EU got in England d and Wales is actually more than Respect did in 2004 (252,000, on a higher turnout)).

In Scotland the situation is different. The 42,000 of the SLP, No2EU and SSP is less than the 61,000 received in 2004 and little different from the 39,000 received in 1999.

Of particular note was the collapse of the SSP, which lost 80% of its vote.

The fact that the left has no coherent long-term alternative party to build is a massive issue for the left. But many of those who may be pointing to the failure NO2EU to pull off some kind of miracle for instance should be reminded that the left of Labour vote received by Respect has not shrunk (despite the fall in turn out) and is still there. This could even be seen as surprising considering the difficulties the SA/Respect project has had.

The No2EU campaign managed to reach parts of the country that the SA and Respect were never able to.

In the NW the SLP and NO2EU got 50,000, double the 24,000 Respect got in 2004.

For instance in the North East the SLP and NO2EU got some 18,000 votes (10,000 and 8,000 respectively) double the 8,000 Respect got in 2004.

In the Yorkshire and Humberside Region No2EU got 35,000 as against Respect and the AGS’s joint tally of 44,000, but on a 10% lower turn out.

In he East Midlands turnout was 6% down but the SLP and NO2EU for 25,000, up on the Respects 24,000 in 2004.

Like wise in the East of England 27,000 for SLP/NO2EU as against 13,000 for Respect in 2004.

In the South east 37,000 for SLP/No2EU, almost three times the 13,000 Respect got in 2004.

The South West SLP/No2EU 18,000, Respect in 2004: 10,000.

In Wales SLP/No2EU 21,000, four times Respect’s 5,000 in 2004.

Even in the west Midlands NO2EU got 25,000, 5,000 more than Respect got in 2004.

Clearly SLP/NO2EU have been able to gather support amongst the working class outside of the big metropolitan centres of London and Birmingham in the way that no other left project has been able to.

The campaigns had undeniable weaknesses, bought this is a hidden strength that may well be ignored.

In Scotland the SSP’s vote collapsed. It got 10,000. Compared to the 61,000 votes it received, it has lost four out of five of those who had previously voted for it.

It was beaten by both the SLP. It was also beaten by the BNP (in Scotland!). It finished only 700 votes ahead of NO2EU.

This electoral disaster may well have wiped away any credibility the party may have had left after the vicissitudes of recent years.

The party had in fact decided not to stand in the elections due to lack of resources and an assessment of the situation. It later reversed this decision, mistaekenly so as it turned out.

It was a sectarian folly which Respect nearly repeated in London in trying to compete in an election that in reality it was not capable of doing so.

Could do better

The election has shown a number of things.

Onei s the intense alienation that a large part of the working class from Labour.

This particularly acutely effects the Labour Party but all the main parties suffer from it. The election showed no great enthusiasm for the Tories and there result, as the party likely to form the next government was quite poor.

There is a well of bitterness and anger in this country that can go many different ways. The resilience of the BNP vote gives it a base from which it can grow in future.

The resilience of the left of Labour vote, both in terms of the Greens (to the extent that it is a left of Labour vote) and No2EU/SLP shows that there is still the basis for a new party of the working class. This is all the more so when one considers how the left has managed to burn itself through so many different parties and formation in elections in the last twelve years.

The potential is there. The left needs to do better.

Southwark Respect backs No2EU

Nick Wrack, Southwark Respect member and No2EU candidate in London, writes on the Southwark branch website about why they are backing No2EU:

Southwark Respect has decided to support to No2EU in the Euro Elections in London. Other branches of Respect have also voted to back it.

The NO2EU list in the capital is headed by Bob Crow, leader of the rail workers union, the RMT and the most militant union in the country.

Other candidates in London include Kevin Nolan, convener of the Visteon workers in Enfield.

NO2EU is an important initiative that that seeks to pose an alternative for working class people to vote for across the country. It is backed by the RMT, many other trade unionists, the CPB and the Socialist Party.

The European Union is a bosses club. Its purpose is to create a Europe in which there are no barriers to big business and to allow the free rule of the market.

It is the EU that has been the greatest force for deregulation and privatisation across the continent in recent years.

Laws passed by the European parliament and the decisions of the European Court have undermined workers’ rights. The posted workers directive, which was at the centre of the Lindsey dispute, is only the best-known example in this country.

The neo-liberal Europe being pushed by the EU must be opposed.

Up until now in this country the arguments against the EU have mostly come from the right.

They create fear that it is scheming foreigners who want to undermine our way of life and whip up feeling against migrant workers.

Yet it has been British governments, whether Labour or Tory, that have pushed most enthusiastically for privatisation and deregulation in the EU.

No2EU stands for international workers solidarity. It is an opportunity to undermine the racist lies of the right.

Mainstream politics is dominated by a deadening consensus. Despite the economy sliding into the greatest crisis since in fifty years the differences between the major parties are miniscule.

Rather than reject the economic policies that have led to this crisis Gordon Brown’s government is giving us more of the same. Rather than taking the failed banking system into full state control and using it for the good of ordinary people they have thrown billions to the bankers.

And we will be paying for this for a generation to come. Whoever forms the next government they will push for massive cuts in public spending and services.

New Labour has betrayed the working class and accepted the bosses’ agenda lock stock and barrel.

They have betrayed the hopes that millions put in them in 1997. This has created conditions for the growth of the BNP and other parties of the right.

To resist the shift to the right, and to defend working class people against the crisis and the inevitable attacks on jobs, wages and conditions that it will bring, the working class needs a political alternative that can gain mass support. The working class needs a new party to represent it. That is the reason why Respect was formed five years ago.

In 1901 the RMT (the NUR as it then was) became one of the founding members of the Labour party because it realised the labour movement needed its own political voice. In 2004 it was expelled from that same party.

The fact that it is now one of the main moving forces behind No2EU is of massive importance. It is a sure sign that many in the labour movement now see the necessity to pose an electoral alternative to the neo-liberal consensus.

NO2EU is a temporary platform for the European elections, not a new party. Mistakes will be made, but lessons will also be learnt. But that is why we welcome this and support every step taken by the labour movement to find its own political voce again. That is why in these elections we will be campaigning for No2EU.

Hip Hop for Palestine

Respect at the Carnaval del Pueblo

I haven’t had a whole lot of time to update this recently.

But I did go to the recent Carnaval del Publo in Burgess Park, Southwark (South London), which is Europe’s largeest Latin American Carnival.

Here’s a little film about Respect at the Carnaval.

China – Strike Capital of the World

China’s workers seem set to get the right to strike.

For the last 30 years haven’t had this right as apparently in China they had “eradicated problems between the proletariat and enterprise owners”. The breakneck industrialization of the last twenty years has certainly changed that.

Chinese rapid industrial growth has been based on making itself the workshop of the world producing cheap goods with cheap labour. Just as 200 years ago the industrial revolution Britain made this country the first “workshop of the world” it also produced a turbulent working class and the the first trade union movement; a labour movement that also had to fight long and hard for its legal existence. First outlawed by the Combination Acts and then harassed by other forms of legal, and illegal repression.

China is no different. there are no special chinese characteristics or Confucian ethic at work which make the Chinese working class more servile than anywhere else. Despite intense repression the Chinese working class is finding its voice.

According to a report on Global Labor Strategies there were some 96,000 recorded “major public disturbances” in China last year, many connected to industrial disputes.

In a report about the proposed labour reforms Han Dongfang claims that in the Pearl River industrial region (around Canton) there are workers protests nearly every day.

Han Dongfang set up the first fee trade union in China, the Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation, during the Tiananmen protests of 1989. Though crushed in the subsequent repression it made him one of he most wanted men in China. He was imprisoned but released and eventually ended up in Hong Kong from where he now runs the China Labour Bulletin, an organization which campaigns for workers’ rights in China.

Read an interview with Han in the New Left Review.

Howard Zinn: An illustrated people’s history of the US empire

Howard Zinn is probably best known for his book A Peoples History of the United States. Having sold more 1.7 million copies world-wide it still apparently sells 100,000 copies a year.

It is a classic of “history from below” and tells the story of the US from the point of view rarely heard from, charting as it does the struggles of people from the Native Americans resisting European invasion and conquest to the struggle against slavery and the civil war up to the sixties and seventies and Rivil Rights, women’s liberation and a lot more in between.

He is not just an academic historian (despite a prodigious output) he has been active in progressive movements in the US for more than fifty years.

He was fired from his tenured professorship at Spelman College in Georgia in 1963 for Civil Rights activities. Active in the movement he was an advisor to SNCC. The Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee was the most militant wing of the Civil rights movement and lead the famous sit-ins against segregation in public amenities. It was also to be the seedbed for much of the new left, such as the SDS, that would emerge later in the sixties.

Zinn was also to become involved at early stage in the movement against Vietnam War and visited Hanoi during the Tet Offensive of 1968.

Daniel Ellsberg entrusted Zinn with a copy of the Pentagon Papers. He annotated them long with Noam Chomsky. It was this edition of the papers that came to be known as the Mike Gavel edition.

The story of the Pentagon Papaers is bizarre even by the standards of those turbulent times.

In 1967 Robert McNamara, then Secretary of Defence, and the one of the chief architects of the continuous military escalation in Vietnam, commissioned a secret report charting the US’s involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. It was compiled by a team of 36 and comprised more than 4,000 pages of documents.

Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst, and one of the few people to have access to the whole set of documents had a Damascene conversion in shock at the cynicism of the US Government and military. The documents revealed that they had long since known that the war was unwinable and that the casualty count was going to be huge. The papers revealed that they had lied, and lied, and lied to the American people.

Ellsberg photocopied the whole set of documents and leaked them.

To cut a long and convoluted story short the Nixon Administration tried to suppress their publication by the New York Tines, but was only partially successful. But by that point the US establishment was tearing itself apart over the war. In order to circumvent these attempts at suppressing the papers Mike Gavel, a Senator for Alaska and an opponent of the war, exercised his immunity from prosecution for things said on the Senate floor to had 4,100 pages of papers read into the Senate record. This was the Zinn version.

The papers were a bombshell on the US establishment discrediting not only the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration but also the previous Democratic Administrations of Johnson and Kennedy.

Ellsberg himself was eventually prosecuted and faced life imprisons for his “crimes” charged as he was with theft, conspiracy and espionage. The trial spectacularly collapsed when it emerged that his psychiatrist had been burgled in search of material to smear him with. The burglary had been carried out by G Gordon Liddy and E Howard Hunt, who were of course two of Nixon’s “plumbers”, employed by him to stop leaks. Thus the whole affair became swept up in the Watergate Scandal.

Zinn is still active and continues to be a thorn in the side of the powers that be in the United States and long may he continue to be so.

A Lenin for our times?

The disintegration of Social Democracy in Europe, both organizationally and as a political project, presents both opportunities and problems for socialists and revolutionaries.

The Labour Party in Britain, and Social Democratic parties elsewhere in Europe have politically dominated the working class and the the labour movement for a most of the last century. Where mass Communist Parties have existed, in countries such as Italy and France, they carried out the same function and became in the post-war period ideologically indistinguishable from the mass Social Democratic parties.

These parties, have in times of crisis, have been the greatest bulwark against radical change. Their demise the greatest opportunity for real socialist ideas to connect with the working class for a long, long time.

The responsibility on the left to carry out this task tough is a great one, but it presents a whole host new problems. It is a new turn in the class struggle that will require a re-examination of our political traditions in order to navigate it.

There is nothing new in this. Every generation of Marxist faced with such a change in the conditions around them have had to go through such process. Lenin had to face up to the inadequacy of Social Democracy, Trotsky had to address the degeneration of “Communism”, and the new left of the sixties had to deal with both.

Ideas were brushed off and refashioned, or they were dumped; new theory had to be created where the old was no longer “fit for purpose.”

Paul Le Blanc has written a number of challenging books and articles on the Marxist revolutionary tradition and in particular the politics of Lenin and Luxembourg.

In the May June edition of the International Socialist Review there are articles by Paul Le Blanc, Lars Lih and Helen Scott based on a panel discussion held in New York in March of this year.

In it he mentions, quite appositely, that

Lenin’s Bolshevik organization was part of a broad global working-class formation, part of a developing labor movement, and part of an evolving labor-radical subculture that embraced masses of people. Much experience of the U.S. Left demonstrates that an effort to create such an organization outside of such a context all too often degenerates into the construction of a political sect, with well-meaning activists penned up in a world of their own, separate and apart from the working class.

The development of a broad, numerically significant layer and subculture of socially conscious people who are part of the working class is essential for creating the kind revolutionary party that Lenin helped build. The accumulation of a significant percentage of activists who are part of that layer is the precondition for such a party. This can’t simply be proclaimed by a handful of would-be Leninists

He has written a number of fascinating books such as Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience, A Short History of the U.S. Working Class and Rosa Luxemburg: Reflections and Writings.

For more on him you could read an interview (including some very interesting remarks on religion and “secularism”) in the Monthly Review

Also in this round table discussion is a contribution by Lars Lih. He has written what looks like a fascinating book Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What is to be Done?’ in Context on the said work and Lenin in 1900-1901. A monumental amount of scholarship seems to have gone into its production. Coming in at some 880 pages he seems to have read just about everything pertaining to this period.

Lih tries to put What is to be done? into the context of its times, and the circumstances of its making.

Though it contained ideas which were to have a fundamental importance for the development of Marxism as a revolutionary theory and practice, its importance has been much exaggerated over the years, both by Stalinism, which wanted to turn the works of Lenin into some form of holy revelation, and by bourgeois thinkers looking for the original sin of Bolshevism.

It was of course neither of those things. But neither was it a recipe book for revolution, ”just add cadre”.

Watch this space for a review of it here.

In the meantime there is a review of it by John Molyneux at