Write-up by CM of the discussion, 2 August, which followed DP’s introduction (see The Labour Party – What’s Left?)

Additional points by JT, 4 August, and from PH, 5 August, and further papers from GB, 8 August and 13 August, from BE, 9 August 2007, from CM, 13 August 2007

First a comment on the conduct of the discussion. After the discussion on ‘Socialism and Climate Change’, 3 May 2007, I began my write-up with:

‘this was a candidate for best ever group discussion. The Chair (DP) indicated that the speaker (PH) who was kicking off the discussion would speak for 5 minutes or so, and then others could come in and contribute for a similar amount of time. And that was what happened, and the mix of contributions was varied and fascinating.’

The August meeting’s discussion was not like that. DP’s introduction was fine, if perhaps a bit too long, and perhaps as a result he was interrupted quite a lot, hence a ‘descent’ into, in my view, less a ‘group discussion’, more a cheerful verbal punch-up between the male comrades present. I interrupted, asking that we take turns to contribute, and that was agreed too, also amiably, but the mêlée resumed after one ‘round’. What follows is taken from my (CM’s) notes, not all in any logical or coherent sequence, but ‘as it came’.

DP (additional to what is in his paper, with others’ contributions coming in):

DP was active in Labour Party (‘LP’) in 1980s when the concern was how to get into power. Trades Unions (‘TUs’), after their rise in 19C, feared to lose the right to organise and be heard, so needed representation in Parliament. 1918 Representation of the People’s Act increased electorate hugely. 1924 first Labour Government for nine months did little. 1945 were the glory days, voted in by retiring soldiers wanting a better life. Several big industries were nationalised: coal, steel, railways. The Welfare State was already in place, but the NHS was built. Portillo has said that the Tories would have done the same. In early 60s there was a big battle over nuclear disarmament. Climb in TU membership in 1970s-80s. Days lost in strikes maximised in 60s. Healey as Chancellor made a deal with the IMF. Pay restraint. Castle’s ‘In Place of Strife’ before that. Big battles between LP and TU movement in the ‘Winter of Discontent.’ Militancy in late 70s because policy of nationalisation of top industries was ignored. Changed method of choosing the leader. Use of an electoral college for deputy leader was challenged, Healey won narrowly over Benn. The SDP split. Committee for Social Democracy. Thatcher unpopular in early 1980s because of high unemployment and Tory vote down. Left marginalised by 1988. In 2007 we have George Brown appointing ex-CBI Digby Jones in a trade and industry role. LP membership is down from its peak of half a million to a million, and at 200 thousand or less is half what it was in 1997. TU influence is much less. LP Conference used to involve grassroots democracy, but Kinnock had formed the Policy Review Committee, where members could ‘make a submission’ which would be discussed, but it became impossible to change Party policy. TU members used to be effectively LP members, so there were millions, and there was a clear link between the LP and organised labour. Now a third of TU members vote Tory.

BE: 1960s and 70s was the height of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Discussion re relationship between CPGB and LP.

CM: (following appeal for an end to the ‘male mêlée’, and for individual contributions in turn – but her contribution not very coherent due to that atmosphere): DP announced his introduction would be ‘a materialist perspective’ on the LP, and surely that means a focus on the economy and the means of production, which we haven’t had, apart from some mention of how some crises were dealt with; instead we’ve had the electoral history of the LP, and its relationships with TUs and CPGB. Understandable, as they’ve always been so small, there’s been no mention of the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB), founded in 1904. But the SPGB has always said that the LP in power has always behaved just like the Tories, doing what is required by the capitalists. Only in opposition would they sound like the Left, with socialist policies. The only time the LP acted as one would expect a socialist party to act was in 1945, when key industries were nationalised, as per Clause 4: ‘To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof which may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.’ After 1945 there was no more nationalisation. Why is that? [This was a rhetorical question. The answer is that the State taking over industries badly disrupted due to the War suited the capitalists, who were amply compensated, and so won both ways. Later on, when these industries could be profitable, the capitalists got them back. A powerful illustration of the SPGB’s point.]

SE: Whilst I agree with CM’s point – and the SPGB – it’s not as simple or as bad as that. Inevitably there have to be compromises when Labour’s in power, and the need to work with the capitalists. There’s a book I read, by Miliband – have to read it again – that explains it really well. (DP supplied later: Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study of the Politics of Labour (1961), ISBN 0-85036-135-4.)

JT: Hmm! the SPGB, they’ve been called ‘the Small Party of Good Boys’, I like that. And they’ve always been really small. Yes, there is a tendency for LP to move to the Left in opposition, and to the Right in power, but it’s not like ‘donning different cloaks’ and it’s different people who make that happen. What Kinnock did was inevitable. The LP’s relationship with the CPGB is interesting. In 1951 CPGB said that the LP was its main instrument.

BE: On the CP, the Euro-communist trend – against the miners strike because it was unwinnable. Arthur (Scargill) was unstoppable. No one could sell an idea like he could. With the Scottish Socialist Party, it was all Arthur or nothing. 1970 CP had massive influence, and Militant on miners. Soviet Union, DP skipped over all that.

GB: What Chris said was fascinating, but she’s quite wrong! The big problem for capitalism is that they’re exploiting workers for profit. The growth in the Public Sector has been a problem fpr capitalism. The SPGB always stood on the sidelines at demos, like the CND’s, and told people ‘You’re wasting your time, you should be doing something else.’ But what they don’t see is that consciousness in the working class arises from its struggles. Capitalism is all about living struggles, wild and unpredictable. LP represents a stage of development that has gone by – they represent a stage when organised workers wanted more from capitalism. The NHS raised morale – not something socialist. Sundry Trot groups advocate Reformist policies, not one had a way forward. DP is right when he says we need a new workers party. The movement developes understanding through struggle. State funding for the LP would suit it. It would still get money from TUs and rich businessmen after peerages.

BE: The working class don’t want socialism, never voted for it. LP has played capitalist game, it’s a reformist party. But I’d put up a poster for Ben Bradshaw because he’s a nice guy, and does his best. Other countries, such as Italy, Left tried harder. French big Left-wing movement. Minimum wage is good thing, also Tax Credit. Poverty, especially child poverty still rife. With Brown we may see small benefits for the poor and pensioners. At present millionaire Party donors are not doing much, nervous over the cash for peerages thing, but that makes a difference, LP can’t afford an election.

DP: Various things I missed. 1926 General Strike. 1951 CPGB publish reformist ‘ British Road to Socialism’. 1936 Trotsky joined the French LP. On SPGB and LP serving capitalism, LP has never been a homogenous entity. Suppose Benn had won the Deputy Leadership, maybe then the Left would have supported the miners strike. There was a shift in the LP 1984-5 which was dramatic and horrible. The Left fell to 10% suddenly. There were big contradictions and it could have gone either way. LP no longer same beast as prior to 1984. The Anti-Poll Tax struggle brought in loads of new people who’d never been political before. John Lloyd, a potential candidate for LP, addressed a big angry Anti-Poll Tax crowd, said he was sympathetic, but people mustn’t break the law, must pay the Tax, and was booed off the platform. There were big disputes then between Militant and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), with Militant saying ‘don’t pay’ and SWP insisting the struggle must involve Local Government workers refusing to administer the Tax. Pete Edwards of the RMT, who used to be Old Labour and sympathetic to the Exeter Socialists, meeting up with Pete Sloman and others, in favour of the bus strike, is now Labour Leader of Exeter City Council.

[What follows was again a free-for-all and difficult to make notes on.]

BE: Sam McClusky joined the Freemasons movement and Catholic Action, which has an influence on the hierarchy of LP and TU movement, promoting the traditional family and morality. A problem with British TU movement is it’s always had a career structure. Elsewhere TU’s are democratised, or operating by ‘Buggins turn’. Now leaders earn too much.

GB: One time a Maoist got elected but was frozen out.

BE: I’ve belonged to the National Union of Seamen, which has no elected officials, they’re appointed by EC, but when a communist got appointed or elected, their way of dealing with that was to work them to death.

GB: Another one is Lord Treasman, LP General Secretary. Lecturers Union.

DP: Engels talked about the ‘aristocracy of labour’, Catholic Action and groups like that. Eric Hamond, Frank Chappell, Bill Jordan of the Engineers Union, all on the Trade Union Committee on European and Transatlantic Understanding (TUCETU).

GB: Networks of right-wingers in TUs. Effective organisers earn a position, get sent to LP and get elected, usually in a by-election. There is a minimal role for TUs, minor issues of pay and conditions, never strike.

JT: With Kinnock and Blair people were parachuted in. Several LP people were briefly CP: Mandelson, Jack Straw, Charles Clark, maybe John Reid, and Eric Hobsbawn very influential with Kinnock. Martin Kettle, deputy editor of the Guardian, objectionable middle class twit, used to be communist therefore incapable of anything reactionary. Democratic Left Nina Temple. Straight Left within CP – Stalinist, orthodox. Tragic, party tearing itself apart.

GB: 1945 Tories would have gone for Beverage Report. It wasn’t just young servicemen’s vote. Previous election was in 1935, big gap because should have been election in 1939, and the change of public opinion was a shock. The Beveridge Report was a best seller – unconceivable now, people queuing up to buy it, like a Harry Potter novel. 1944 Butler Act. Hungary 40% of Left left. Nuclear disarmament.

CM: What about the future of the LP?

It was suggested and agreed that JT should lead a discussion on ‘The Future of the Left’ in October.

The next meeting will be on 6 th September on ‘Housing in Britain: The History, the Current Situation, in Exeter’, led by SE.

[Comment on this discussion by CM: It would be good if someone would follow through on DP’s intention to ‘look at the Labour Party from a materialist perspective’, going further into what it means to ask: ‘what are the class forces?’, by considering what was happening to the economy in Britain and internationally last century: economic growth and cycles, the impact of two world wars, impact of new technology, new-imperialism and exploitation of natural resources and the the majority world, the accumulation and movement of capital, the impact on job prospects on the economic, and hence political strength, of the British working class and TUs, under what economic circumstances Labour got into power, what compromises the Party had to make and what kind of Labour politicians capitalists were able to ‘do business with’, what economic circumstances brought the Tories back into power, and so on.]

JT: Additional thoughts on the issue: I don’t think calls for a “new workers party” are in themselves very helpful. For a start, they are extremely abstract – a workers party yes, but what kind of workers party? A communist workers party? A social-democratic workers party? a national socialist German workers party? A party with any programme whatsoever, but with a bunch of workers in it? Often, when such formulations arise, the phrase is kept abstract deliberately – it functions as an alibi for officially revolutionary Trotskyist, etc, groups to “dabble” in reformism to build their numbers on the sly (eg, the SWP/Respect, more than likely the SPEW/CNWP, and one may broadly cram Scargill’s endless search for exact replicas of himself via the SLP into this category too). To the extent that such organisations do arise, I will say that they arise spontaneously – as GB implies – from the movement. Thus, when Marxist groups set up these reformist fronts the results are essentially doomed to stagnation. If there is a burning desire among the workers for a “new workers party”, let them form one. We shall of course join and intervene and argue our corner, but deliberately forming one either based on some rigid pseudo-Menshevik theory of the necessary “stages” of revolutionary consciousness or as an opportunistic cash-in is nothing less than an affront to the initiative of the masses.

Secondly, there’s the rather obvious objection that we already have a workers party, formed on the initiative of the proletariat (if only its “aristocracy”) which still commands the support of the working class at large – the Labour party! The problem with it at present is that Militant (and Cde DP) really are right – the party machinery which allowed any serious left-wing organisations to either operate within it, as with the Trotskyists and aspects of Stalinist/CP strategy, or directly pull the strings from without, as with the networks of communist and fellow-travelling trade-unionists are all but gone. I wanted to make the point, clearer than I actually did, that the free-fall collapse in proletarian militancy which followed the miners’ strike’s defeat essentially acted as a bullet to the heart of LP democracy – that it is not a matter of Neil Kinnock being an inept dictatorial bastard, or the Euros in his coterie being likewise, but for materialists a matter of the class struggle. The obvious corollary is that a snap back into the Labour party as a viable site of struggle is no less possible – and will be dictated no doubt in much the same way. Where I disagree with SPEW, the SWP and so on is that they refuse to acknowledge this fact, and have simply declared Labour “dead” – again, mostly for opportunistic reasons. Their strategy is – in this respect – right but for the wrong reasons: we should forget about the LP for now not because it is impossible to change, but because we have a much better chance of forcing a shift to the left from outside, by attacking it from the left. Circumstances may well force the LP into oblivion and throw up a new organ of working class representation, as happened with the formation of the LRC way back when, and the break of the trade unions with the Liberals. But this will not come about via a few thousand Trots in an awkward reformist disguise.

PH: I think that I have at least a dim contemporaneous recollection of most of DP’s points from no 10 onwards. It’s not a new thought but is not a fundamental problem that, I would think that most of my colleagues at work would be hard pressed to put any of those points in context (although many of them would be able to tell me who was up for eviction in Big Brother). I don’t think that this is due to a particularly poor set of colleagues (one or two even have degrees...) nor their age (my boss is almost ten years older than me but had forgotten/didn’t know that Heath was in any way implicated in the rota power cuts in the early seventies) but more to do with a complete disengagement with politics in general.

Those that do take an interest are unable/unwilling to draw distinctions between the few politicians who have any genuine integrity about them and the seeming majority of placemen and lackies who do nothing but seek to further their own careers. DP’s last note about Digby Jones is well made – if you can now become a politician without even going through that tiresome process of engaging with the electorate, what hope is there for politics?

Secondly, and apologies for this flippant comment, but fire, flood and now pestilence, all within the first hundred days of a new PM – is someone trying to tell us something?

BE:

GB [see his paper] looks forward to the totally democratic, leaderless socialist society, I think in a way we all do, where we differ is like he says, on the means of reaching this point which suggests anarchism in its purest form, no leaders, no governments, no exploitation. I don’t think anyone could argue with his brief history of the Labour party, I am not a historian but I found it extremely good from a hard left viewpoint. What I would like to learn is how Geoff would see any left advance in the future and what form this would take assuming the next generation can be saved from the celebrity culture and binge drinking. If you are anti leaders and political parties/movements then I sense an awful trust in the innate goodwill of mankind, something I find hard to share. Something I find very interesting is the amount of personal debt being carried in this country which when it comes to a head or implodes could lead to unstable times combined with the rising prices of energy, water and food.

I must take issue in defence of my spiritual home on GB’s claim that the CPGB lost 40% of their membership in ’56 after the death of Uncle Joe and the Soviet tanks rumbling into Budapest. CPGB membership fell from about 35,000 to 28,000 during that time which is about 20% not the 40% that the trots and capitalist press have always claimed. This figure of approx 7000 is actually shown in official CPGB documents both at the Working Class Library in Manchester and more recently opened archives in Moscow.

For opinion and evidence on this I suggest the following

* Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen, Andrew Flinn et al., Communists and British Society 1920 – 1991 (Rivers Oram Press, 2007)

* John Callaghan, Cold War, Crisis and Conflict – the CPGB 1951 – 68 (Lawrence & Wishart, 2003)

* Alison Macleod, The Death of Uncle Joe, (Merlin Press, 1997) ( A real anti party diatribe by former TV critic of the Daily Worker and big Peter Fryer supporter)

* Francis Becket, The Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party, (Merlin Press, 1995). Sometime Guardian journo that despite the lurid title is not a bad read, especially the last chapters about the rise of the designer socialists/Martin Jaques/ Nina Temple and the other traitors.

BE

CM:

BE says: ‘If you are anti leaders and political parties/movements then I sense an awful trust in the innate goodwill of mankind, something I find hard to share.’

This is really the crucial issue, isn’t it? I actually agree with BE, despite the various arguments about how altruism may have evolved in our species, all the anecdotal ‘evidence’ and general wishful thinking about how much people do for each other unrewarded by money or even by social approval, which is true enough, but there’s also plenty of opposite kind of behaviour. My feeling is that self-interest – probably including the interests of one’s family – has to be involved. There have been studies of pre-capitalist society, particularly pre-industrial revolution, also of places where capitalism hadn’t reached or where people were excluded, which shows that ‘community’, without leaders (or perhaps I should say ‘rulers’) or coercion, ‘works’ to the advantage of the members, and obviously the workings historically and geographically have been very varied, so we can’t say: ‘It’ll be like this or that,’ people will have to work it out for themselves, design new communities, working with the land and other resources they have available mainly locally – which is why permaculture interests me. But the permaculture movement isn’t political, in Britain tends to be somewhat hippie, drop-out, sectarian. Elsewhere in the world, especially in parts of the majority world, it’s more respected with higher profile.

CM

PS Useful ref: Craig Calhoun, ‘Community: Towards a Variable Conceptualization for Comparative Research’, in R.S. Neale, ed. History and Class: Essential Readings in Theory and Interpretation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), pp.86-110 (Neale comes down heavily on some of this in his Afterword, but still…)

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