Ken Loach and Left Unity

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/25/labour-party-left



By Ken Loach, Kate Hudson and Gilbert Achcar

As the age of austerity bites harder and deeper than many anticipated, it is little wonder that Ken Loach's new film The Spirit of '45, charting the great post-war social advances, strikes a powerful chord. Yet the promise of opportunity, dignity, health and work, fulfilled by Labour's welfare state after 1945, is not to be one that we can look to today's Labour party for. Yet contemporary Britain – and beyond – is precisely where such policies are needed.

Austerity is wreaking economic catastrophe on Europe, most recently on the people of Cyprus, but George Osborne is still following the same disastrous policies. Last week's budget came as no surprise: Osborne announced yet more spending cuts and extended the public sector's pay rise cap, amounting to a real terms pay cut. He's digging us even further into an economic hole, as the Office for Budget Responsibility's revised output forecast shows – from a predicted 1.2% growth down to 0.6%. That sounds like further decline, not the promised growth, and ordinary people are paying the price. The virulence of the government's economic attacks knows no bounds: Atos, workfare, council tax, the bedroom tax – punitive policies against the most vulnerable in society.

Judged by its own stated goals, government policy isn't working – borrowing will be around £61.5bn higher than planned. Of course the reality is that austerity policies are actually designed to dismantle the welfare state, bring down wages and fully marketise the economy, destroying all the social and economic gains of ordinary people since the second world war. So from the government point of view the policies are working.

Across society, there is an increasing understanding of the government's real agenda and as a result, opposition is mounting and economic alternatives are being discussed. Only last week, the Guardian published a letter from over 60 economists, warning that the worst was yet to come with 80% of the cuts still ahead of us.

Yet while economic alternatives are articulated, where can we turn politically to see these expressed as party policy? Who is on our side, to fight for an alternative? In the past many expected the Labour party to stand for us, and with us, but no longer. Workfare? Last week Labour abstained on the vote and now the government can work over quarter of a million jobseekers. Bedroom tax? Would a Labour government repeal it?

We need policies that reject Tory cuts, regenerate the economy and improve the lives of ordinary people. We are not getting this from Labour. There is no doubt that some of Labour's past achievements have been remarkable – the welfare state, the NHS; a redistributive economy making unprecedented levels of health and education possible. But such achievements are in the past. Now Labour embraces cuts and privatisation and is dismantling its own great work. Labour has failed us. Nothing shows the contrast more clearly than The Spirit of '45.

Labour is not alone in its shift rightwards and its embrace of neoliberal economic policies. Its sister parties across Europe have taken the same path over the past two decades. Yet elsewhere in Europe, new parties and coalitions – such as Syriza in Greece or Die Linke in Germany – have begun to fill the left space, offering an alternative political, social and economic vision. The anomaly which leaves Britain without a left political alternative – one defending the welfare state, investing for jobs, homes and education, transforming our economy – has to end. For this reason we are calling on people to join the discussion on forming a new party of the left – you can find out more about our appeal here. The working class cannot remain without political representation, without defence, when all its victories and advances are being destroyed.

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/955/the-left-loach-makes-his-bid-for-unity


However, as the Weekly Worker has consistently argued, the answer does not lie within the SWP alone. Its members make up just one section, albeit a relatively important one, of the revolutionary left; and the crying need is for the creation of a single Marxist party based on genuine democratic centralism, where each trend, platform or faction has the right to publicly state its own politics, while implementing majority decisions. Where the minority has the right to fight to become the majority.

True, there have been numerous attempts to unite the left on the basis of politics other than Marxism, and the latest such attempt is Ken Loach’s Left Unity appeal, which now claims over 5,000 signatories. This news should not be greeted with a sectarian sneer or treated with haughty indifference. On the contrary, it is to be welcomed. And the revolutionary left should seek to actively involve itself in any unity process. Not unity for the sake of unity, but with the aim of winning the argument for a Communist Party armed with a Marxist programme.

Of course, it is very early days. Five thousand signatures are not 5,000 members and even 5,000 members is nothing compared with what objective circumstances call for. Naturally there will be those ‘Marxists’ who insist that the time is not right for Marxism, that Keynesianism, that rosy image of 1945 Labour, that a reformist government committed to rebuilding the NHS and the welfare state represent the ‘realistic’ option. We have heard that too many times from the likes of the Socialist Alliance, Respect, Alliance for Green Socialism, Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, etc. But if we do not fight we shall never win.

So we have some sympathy for what Paris Thompson, one of the ‘Facebook Four’, has written: “I believe that many, many activists that are currently non-aligned (and many that are) would be drawn into any new grouping, enticed by the prospect of a serious, united left party. This would not only provide a much needed realignment of the left and facilitate more coordinated work within the anti-cuts movement: it would also provide an audience for the ideas of the Marxist left.”

Comrade Thompson goes on to state: “The formation of a revolutionary communist party, which is a shared end goal of almost the entirety of the Marxist left, can only be hampered by the division of the left into innumerable sects and grouplets, each with their own shibboleths to defend ...

“… we should be aiming to draw in as many people as possible into a revolutionary unity project, which can seek to unite the far left on the basis of the many principles upon which we agree. The scale of the international crisis is not only making the possibility of Marxist unification a much more realistic prospect: it is making it an absolute necessity. I believe the IS Network should place itself at the centre of these discussions, and should see its role as bringing about a much needed realignment within the British working class movement.”

The implication is clear. We support left unity as a step towards a Communist Party.

[subcp]

I don't think there is the capital to promote a new era of Keynesian/underconsumptionist state policies in the central capitalist nations. The depth of the crisis is not so superficial that a 'Labour Party circa 1964', if elected, can enact such measures and 'reverse' the trajectory of capitalism today- not even if such parties were elected across Europe and Japan with the same stated objective.

'Left Unity' isn't going to build any kind of organization- let alone the next International. The party is necessary at a specific moment of the next revolutionary wave- while I agree (in the most reserved terms) that the time is now for the formation of the next class party, it won't be by merging a bunch of left sects together. It requires a great deal of political discussion and debate, not a lowest-common-denominator amalgamation of various small groups, sects and nominal parties.

[Vanguard1917]

The welfare state was the product of post-war capitalist restructuring. It wasn't the 'remarkable achievement' of the Labour Party - non-left administrations of that period were also committed to the post-war settlement. The Weekly Worker has been right to criticise the absurdity of pleas that Labour return to its nonexistent 'golden age'.

[subcp]

Exactly; there was a common response to economic needs (and the class struggle) across political boundaries in the post-war (1945-1973) period. We can see the opposite phenomenon today- no matter how 'left' the government is, there is a commitment to austerity: which all suggests a structural basis for the bourgeois state, rather than instrumentalist basis. Which would mean any attempts at capturing political power at the state level are useless diversions that only reinforce the state.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Parties and party-ism is dead. It's movements we need.

I'm so suspicious of this 'we need one united left party'. A left party is never going to be united, and if it's not united then there'll be splits and there won't be unity anyway. It's a no-hoper, a false start.

We need to forget our little British version of 'Battleshits: my left party is bigger than yours' and start actually engaging within the working class, properly. If we don't do it, then reformists and the labour party will take advantage and we'll lose ground very quickly and for the next generation. We've already fucked this up the past 4 years or so and i'm not that optimistic that there is enough foresight and leadership within the existing British left to succeed in this task.

[The Idler]

I'm not against a movement for socialism, but they would seem to be more susceptible to Labour Party interests than an independent party would.

[goalkeeper]

A film maker, a tankie and an academic from SOAS walk into a bar...

[Q]

The Left Unity appeal has gathered a promising level of support, but runs the risk of repeating past mistakes, argues Harley Filben (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/956/left-unity-appeal-realise-potential-avoid-pitfalls).



http://www.cpgb.org.uk/assets/images/wwimages/ww956/sm%20KenLoach3.jpg
Ken Loach: illusory

Unity is in the air - again. After more than a decade of rapidly diminishing returns - from the initially promising Socialist Labour Party and Socialist Alliance, to the hopelessly compromised likes of Respect and the Scottish Socialist Party, to the undead Anti-Capitalist Initiative and Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition - the cry is being raised once more.

The voices this time, initially, were those of an unlikely duo: Kate Hudson and Andrew Burgin, whose political trajectory has taken them into the ranks or orbit of too many different organisations to count. Some unity-mongers, who split at the drop of a hat (most recently, both found their positions in Respect untenable due to George Galloway’s crude defence of Julian Assange - his vocal opposition to abortion rights, stem cell research and the rest being perfectly kosher for these sensitive souls, apparently).

The song was made sweeter by Ken Loach, the most prominent socialist film-maker this country has produced, whose national treasure status - built on clip-show favourite Cathy, come home, Kes and other acknowledged classics of social realism - has proven impermeable even to laudatory films about the Irish Republican Army. He and comrade Burgin share political ancestry in Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party (comrade Loach also had a spell in Respect, although it predates the involvement of Hudson and Burgin).

Loach’s endorsement, it seems, was enough to force the eminently sensible idea of the left uniting in a single organisation far enough into the mainstream not to be easily ignored - and it hasn’t been. At least 5,000 people have signed Loach’s brief appeal and thus endorsed the idea of “a new political party of the left”,1 which is encouraging in and of itself. The website claims that 60 local supporting groups have been set up, although there is little evidence of their existence beyond a name and contact email for each. The names vary from Tusc members Nick Wrack and Will McMahon, to (recently ex) Green Party left Jim Jepps, to academic and poet Keston Sutherland, with groups in place from Fife to Exeter.

It must be conceded, on the other hand, that there is a great deal working against the new initiative. The appeal notes correctly that “the Labour Party is not presenting a strong opposition to austerity and instead appears to have wholeheartedly adopted neoliberal policy”, but it still arises at a time when Labour is in opposition, and thus the dynamics of the British political cycle are working against it. As we have repeatedly argued, the reactionary nature of the Labour Party is all too easily offset by the sense that people have nowhere else meaningful to go - not to say the brute force of the bourgeois consensus behind austerity bearing down on them.

Meanwhile, the appearance of these local groups is a positive thing, but it remains to be seen how many of them exist beyond the snazzy Google map that plots them on the Left Unity website. A measured and reasonable article in the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s paper Solidarity puts the point quite nicely:

“If an activist group with a known record of political activity makes a call for unity, then people judge it partly according to their opinion of that record. If a splinter of a split of a splinter (just two people initially, as with Burgin and Hudson, or a few dozen, as with Counterfire) makes an appeal, and puts it in the vaguest terms ... then everyone can read into it what they want. Everyone who wants to build a socialist organisation, but is unsure about how to do it, and so holds back from joining any of the existing groups, can believe they have found a short cut. Just a click on a website, or a ‘like’ on Facebook, and they’re already part of the big movement they want!”2

The initiators in this case have the advantage of coming at it relatively clean - those in the know are aware of Burgin’s and Hudson’s backgrounds, but many others will know only Loach’s reputation as a conscientious filmmaker. They have the disadvantage of being ‘generals without armies’. The Socialist Workers Party, at least until its recent travails and probably still today, has the requisite organisational muscle to give even its most deluded pipe dreams some semblance of reality. Unless serious forces get on board, this latest unity call will face the problem of a simple lack of foot soldiers, for which Facebook likes and petition signatories are no substitute.

As for the political basis of this new formation, it should hardly surprise anyone to find that it is dreadful. The appeal notes that “The welfare state is being dismantled by the coalition government, bringing great suffering to the most vulnerable in society and eroding the living conditions of millions of ordinary people.” True enough.

We need instead to return to the ‘spirit of 45’, as the title of Ken Loach’s Nye Bevan nostalgia-fest documentary has it, when “the post-war generation transform[ed] the lives of ordinary people by bringing improved health, housing, education and social security to the people of Britain. We need to defend these achievements and continue the tradition of protecting the most vulnerable in society.”

A little more meat is hidden away on the website’s ‘About’ page, demanding “a new political formation which rejects austerity and war, advocates a greater democratisation of our society and institutions, and poses a new way of organising everyday life”.3 Exactly what this means is left to the imagination - which is just as well, because no imagination went into these platitudes at all.

More details come from an article in The Guardian by Loach, Hudson and Gilbert Achcar, the Mandelite historian whose most recent claim to fame was lurching bizarrely into a pro-imperialist line during the Libyan war.4 Here, the colours are nailed firmly to the post-war Labourite mast. As ever in such nostalgic eulogies, certain other enduring achievements of Attlee’s government - the bomb, the cementation of Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the United States - are politely overlooked.

The fundamental weakness here is a very old one. While our three authors are perfectly aware that Labour’s shift to the right in the last three decades is hardly unique to it, they fail to draw the obvious conclusion that this was not a matter of various party leaderships deciding, for one reason or another, to become left Thatcherites, but a function of global political shifts after the collapse of Stalinism. Likewise, the national health service and so forth was not the ‘achievement’ of principled politicians, but a strategy of containment in response to increased working class confidence after World War II.

When that strategy was abandoned, so was the ‘socialism’ of social democracy. Its material support had disappeared. Thus the Keynesian platitudes offered up by Hudson, Loach et al are fantasy politics. No objective basis exists for them.

The instinct for unity is a healthy and necessary one. It is fundamental to the existence and success of the workers’ movement. Inasmuch as this initiative gets off the ground, the potential exists for that unity to be made meaningful, by fleshing out its organisation and correcting the doomed politics that animate it. In order for that to happen, three conditions must be met.

Firstly, the resulting organisation must take the Labour Party seriously. We all know that its leadership is rightwing and detestable. But it is also organically connected to the trade unions and other mass organisations of the working class. These institutional links matter, even now that party and unions alike are hollowed out. Until that link is broken - and even after - Labour, and the instinctive support it continues to find in the working class, will remain a serious obstacle for forces to its left, which require strategic thinking to overcome.

Secondly, the existing far left must, equally, be taken seriously. The squabbling sects of which it is comprised may not have the institutional heft of Labour, but contain in their ranks the necessary raw material for building any new organisation from scratch. Left unity requires a battle against the bureaucratic sect regimes that currently perpetuate our divisions - not trying to ignore them.

Thirdly, and most importantly, the left needs to break with its habit of pushing alien politics in the hope of being popular. The vast majority of those of us able, equipped and (potentially) willing to build a united party of the left are committed on some level to Marxism, which - unlike stale 1945 nostalgia - has the potential to change the world for real.

It should be obvious that Kate Hudson and Ken Loach will not fight for this approach themselves. Communists should intervene in this latest left unity initiative, and help it realise its potential - and avoid its pitfalls.

Notes

1. http://leftunity.org/appeal.

2. ‘Left unity must be linked to real action’, March 27.

3. http://leftunity.org/about.

4. March 25.

[l'Enfermé]

Parties and party-ism is dead. It's movements we need.

A real movement is a real party and a real party is a real movement ;)1

edit: Oh look, obligatory DNZ links:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=6559
http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1217