Number 30 - August 2006
Workers ACTION
The socialists of 100 years ago were generally far more optimistic than
their successors today: they saw the worldwide abolition of capitalism within
their own lifetimes as a realistic, even a likely, prospect. Subsequent
experience has dramatically lowered expectations: from the perspective of the
early 21st century, the progress of the socialist project is largely a story of
disappointment and defeat and hopes for the future are necessarily cautious and
tentative; only in
This situation came to an end in 1914, when the leaders of most
social-democratic parties supported the drive to war in pursuit of their
respective ‘national’ interests, prompting the first major rupture in the
organisational unity of the (non-anarchist) left, a split that was consummated
after the Bolshevik Revolution three years later and the establishment of the
Communist International. Today – countless splits (and rather fewer fusions)
later – there is less consensus than ever as to how socialists should organise;
the experience of the last century provides considerably more negative than
positive examples. Moreover, while recent years have seen a heartening upsurge
in popular radicalism – as manifested in the ‘global justice’ and anti-war
movements – this has been driven largely by forces from outside the established
workers’ movement, for whom class need not be central to politics. While the
remnants of the Marxist left continue to assert the unique destiny of the
working class as the revolutionary subject, they often do so in a rather
mechanical way, repeating cherished formulas about vanguard parties, united
fronts and workers’ power but rarely paying serious attention to the
contemporary realities of workers’ social situation and political behaviour.[1]
Yet it is surely essential for socialists to get to grips with these questions,
making a considered assessment of the historical record and the present
conjuncture, if we are to resolve the unfinished business of our movement.
It is necessary to start by acknowledging that the mass parties that
claimed the allegiance of the workers throughout the 20th century have
ultimately failed to make sustained progress towards socialism.[2] Moreover,
this failure has not generally given rise to new mass parties, better equipped
for the job; instead, it has contributed to the widespread collapse of
confidence in socialism as a realisable goal. This applies particularly to the
advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe, North America[3] and
The arguments put forward for the establishment of new parties of the
left usually focus on three factors: the calamitous nature of the current phase
of world capitalism; the increasing readiness of broad popular forces to
challenge oppression, injustice and war; and the inability of the historic mass
parties of the left to provide the necessary political leadership to these
forces. On the first point, there should be little disagreement among
socialists: the socially dysfunctional character of capitalism can rarely have
been clearer than at present, when we face the resurgence of imperialist
aggression and plunder, environmental catastrophe and ever-increasing
disparities of wealth and power within and between states. Such circumstances
undoubtedly call for an urgent response by socialists. As to what form this
response should take, and how this is conditioned by the rise of new
oppositional forces and the degeneration of the mass reformist parties, this is
less clear. I will return to the question of popular radicalisation later.
First I shall deal with the state of the mass parties.
Social democracy:
from retreat to surrender?
Social-democratic parties have, since at least the Second World War,
usually remained the principal parties of the working class (in terms of
membership and electoral support) – at least in those countries where a
substantial working class existed and was free to choose its political party.
Even in those countries, such as
This shift in the political programme of social democracy is regularly
cited as an argument for abandoning work within the historic mass parties, in
favour of establishing new formations. In recent years, it is argued, the
change has been not merely quantitative, but qualitative: not merely a continued rightward drift into unfriendly
territory, but rather a violent lurch over a political precipice. As a
consequence, we are told, socialists no longer have anything to gain by working
within these parties, by attempting to change their policies or influence their
supporters; indeed, their most class-conscious former adherents have already
renounced their former allegiance.
At a time like the present, when social democrats are espousing the free
market, deregulation and privatisation, it is understandable that many left
activists should feel that everything has changed beyond recognition and that a
completely new approach is required. Yet these issues call for sober assessment,
for current developments to be put in their proper historical perspective. For
much of the organised far left, the present seems perpetually to be a time of
unprecedented turmoil: politicians and capitalists were never more treacherous
than they are today, workers and the oppressed never angrier, more united and
more determined to effect change; capitalism never more crisis-ridden. This
sort of default catastrophism makes for good inflammatory rhetoric but poor
political analysis. When a ‘sharp, wrenching turn’ is being proposed, it is
worth pausing to assess whether things really have changed so dramatically as
to render old methods utterly redundant.
As noted earlier, there undoubtedly has
been a significant change in the ideology and programmes of social-democratic
parties, the most significant feature of which has been the general abandonment
of any commitment to the end-goal of a new socialist society, qualitatively
distinct from capitalism. This change has taken place gradually, however. Gregory
Elliott, in a book on the Labour Party, identifies three phases in the history
of social democracy: a ‘Marxist’ phase, lasting from the establishment of the
Second International in 1889 until the First World War; a ‘Keynesian’ phase,
lasting from around 1940 until the mid-1970s; and a ‘social-liberal’ phase that
continues to the present day.[4] The precise dates differ from one country to
another, of course, and different trends have always co-existed; even today,
when most social-democratic leaderships have embraced ‘social-liberal’
policies, there remain plenty of neo-Keynesians and Marxists within the ranks
of their parties. Moreover, the general shift to the right has sometimes, in
some countries, been reversed (albeit usually temporarily). Nevertheless, the
overall political trajectory of these parties has followed the course that
Elliott describes.
Given the distance that now separates mainstream social-democratic
politics from any idea of replacing capitalism with socialism, the political argument for organising in
opposition to these parties seems at first sight fairly persuasive: in peddling
the idea that capitalism is permanent and inevitable, they are deluding and
misleading the workers who support them; consequently, it is necessary to establish
parties that will expose them for what they are and present an authentic
socialist alternative. The political reality is, however, more complex than
this schema would suggest; moreover, there are some significant practical and
organisational questions that need to be addressed.
In emphasising the wretchedness of present-day social democracy, its
left critics sometimes risk giving the impression that its past record was one
of consistent and principled (if ultimately ineffectual) service in the cause
of the workers. The reality is, of course, less edifying. While it would be a
gross injustice to portray all past social-democratic leaders as either class
traitors or dupes, it is arguable that they often did as much harm as good (in
government, at least) to the people they claimed to represent. In foreign
policy, the principles of international proletarian solidarity have regularly
been flouted: from general collusion in the imperialist slaughter of 1914-18,
to the Blair government’s participation in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Even the hallowed Attlee government, let us not forget, took part in the Korean
War. Similarly, in domestic policy, social-democratic governments, even in
their supposed heyday, broke strikes, imposed wage restraint, undermined civil
liberties and abandoned their most ambitious reforms as soon as the bourgeoisie
mustered concerted opposition.
Yet, despite the many unwholesome aspects of the social democrats’
record, the fact is that a majority of workers, at most times and in most
countries, has been willing to accept such leadership, while the various
alternative parties of the left have generally failed to rally mass support.
And in most countries there has been no shortage of such alternatives to social
democracy, ever since the great betrayal over the First World War led to the
widespread formation of Communist parties. From the 1930s onwards, the latter
were themselves challenged from the left by Trotskyist and other revolutionary
parties. While Communist parties have sometimes eclipsed the social democrats
(e.g., in Italy, and in France up to the 1970s), this has usually seen them
behaving like alternative social-democratic parties, rather than representing
something qualitatively different. In none of the advanced capitalist countries
have revolutionary socialist parties ever presented a serious challenge to the
hegemony of the parliamentary-reformist left, despite the latter’s many
failings. Simply denouncing the timidity and ‘misleadership’ of the social
democrats, and offering a more radical approach, has consistently failed to
produce the instantaneous enlightenment achieved by the boy who pointed out the
emperor’s nakedness. Hence the argument that, as long as a majority of the
working class continued to look to the social-democratic parties for leadership
(with whatever illusions), then it was necessary to work inside – or, at least,
close to – these parties, in order to win a hearing among their members and
supporters, the better to persuade them that a different kind of leadership was
required.[5] To distance oneself from these parties was to consign oneself to
political irrelevance.
Many of those who accepted this argument in the past, however, argue
that it no longer applies today: the latest transmutation of social democracy
represents something qualitatively different from before, calling for a
different response. Whereas social democrats always held back the most militant
impulses of the workers, convincing them to opt for compromise, rather than
outright confrontation, with the bourgeoisie, they at least offered significant
structural reforms and real material benefits for the working class. In their
latest incarnation, however, social-democratic parties treat prosperity and
growth as sufficient evidence of the value of their policies, without
questioning how these have been achieved, or whether their benefits have been
equitably distributed. To use Trotsky’s phrase, this is ‘reformism without
reforms’. When social democracy promised to use the power of the state to
restrain the rapacity of capital and to ensure decent employment, housing,
education and healthcare for all citizens, it was difficult to argue that
reformism was a dead end. The Marxist left (or, at least, the more realistic sections
of it) had to take up a position of constructive, comradely criticism:
sympathising with the aspirations of social democracy, but patiently pointing
out to its followers the limits of its reform programme, the imprudence of
relying on the goodwill of the capitalists or their allies within the state, of
expecting economic stability from a fundamentally irrational and crisis-ridden
system. The social democrats had to be kept under pressure to carry out their
own programme (the progressive parts of it, at least) and then to go further;
and if their resolve should fail, they would have to be replaced by a more
determined leadership.
Now, however (so the argument runs), when social democracy seeks state
power in order to enforce the principles of the free market, to discipline
workers ‘for their own good’, it is self-defeating to play down our criticisms
and suggest that the argument is over means rather than ends. Workers do not
have to be convinced that they are being sold short by the social democrats: they
can see that for themselves, as their jobs become less secure, their employment
rights at work are diminished, their public services cut back or privatised.
Their experiences are increasingly making them receptive to an alternative and
it is the responsibility of socialists to provide that alternative, proclaiming
as loudly as possible the political bankruptcy of the established parties.
Table 1: Average vote by decade,
for selected major left parties since the 1970s
|
|
1970s |
1980s |
1990s |
2000s |
||||
|
000’s |
% |
000’s |
% |
000’s |
% |
000’s |
% |
|
|
Australian Labor Party |
3,238 |
44.9 |
4,007 |
46.1 |
4,332 |
40.8 |
4,375 |
37.7 |
|
Austrian Socialist Party |
2,314 |
50.0 |
2,203 |
45.4 |
1,752 |
37.3 |
1,792 |
36.5 |
|
British Labour Party |
11,711 |
39.1 |
9,243 |
29.2 |
12,539 |
38.8 |
10,143 |
38.0 |
|
Danish Social-Democratic Party |
1,041 |
32.2 |
1,017 |
30.9 |
1,198 |
36.0 |
936 |
27.5 |
|
German Social-Democratic Party |
16,637 |
43.8 |
15,051 |
39.4 |
15,126* |
39.7* |
14,538* |
36.7* |
|
New Zealand Labour Party |
669 |
42.8 |
803 |
43.3 |
673 |
32.4 |
887 |
41.2 |
|
Norwegian Labour Party |
867 |
38.8 |
965 |
37.4 |
907 |
36.0 |
738 |
28.5 |
|
Portuguese Socialist Party |
1,885 |
33.4 |
1,499 |
26.5 |
2,196 |
39.0 |
2,315 |
41.4 |
|
Spanish Socialists (PSOE) |
5,425 |
30.0 |
9,048 |
44.0 |
9,288 |
38.2 |
9,473 |
38.4 |
|
Swedish Social Democrats (SAP) |
2,296 |
43.7 |
2,448 |
44.5 |
2,164 |
39.8 |
2,114 |
39.9 |
Actual
and percentage vote for the parties listed, in all national legislative
elections, averaged over each decade. *Post-unification results for Germany
exclude the five former-GDR states, to allow for more meaningful comparisons. Sources:
Australian Government & Politics Database; BBC; Election Resources on the
Internet; Elections New Zealand; Psephos; Statistics Norway; Statistics Sweden;
Wikipedia.
New left parties: the
dog that didn’t bark
This argument certainly has much to recommend it: social democracy, as a
body of ideas and a general approach to government, has qualitatively changed. Anyone who argues that this change is
only superficial and that social democracy is ‘essentially’ the same as it ever
was either began with a dismissive, ultra-left idea of ‘old’ social democracy,
or else has an unduly optimistic impression of how it stands today. Moreover,
there is some evidence that the political retreat of social democracy has
weakened its electoral and membership base, albeit not everywhere (see Table
1). Undoubtedly, it has deterred many class-conscious workers from giving
further support to these parties and – to differing degrees in different
countries – this has created a potential constituency for a political (and
perhaps organisational) break with mainstream social democracy. The extent of
this trend is a matter of some controversy, however. In most advanced
capitalist countries, social-democratic parties remain among the two or three
most popular parties in terms of electoral support and disillusionment with
their shift to the right has not, thus far, generally been translated into mass
support for any rival left party claiming the ground that they have vacated. Of
the new left parties established in advanced capitalist countries over the last
15-20 years, very few have won more than five per cent of the vote in a
national election and the only one to get into double figures has been Spain’s Izquierda Unida (United Left), itself
built around the long-established Spanish Communist Party.
While this may be regrettable, it should not be too surprising, unless
one has simply accepted at face value the somewhat schematic prognoses widely
proffered by the organised far left. The latter tend to overstate the number of
people who, in abandoning a rightward-moving social-democratic party, will
necessarily gravitate towards a more authentically socialist party. Such
exaggeration proceeds, in part, from a somewhat simplistic view of social
psychology, which assumes that people will draw politically radical conclusions
from their observations about the failures or iniquities of bourgeois
politicians. There is little evidence that this happens on a large scale, other
than in the context of major social or industrial struggles. At other times, it
is only those with a very well-developed sense of class-consciousness, or a
clearly worked-out socialist worldview, who follow the script. For the most
part, people who have lost their faith in social democracy can be lumped
together only negatively – in terms of their common disillusionment, rather than
the positive political conclusions that they may draw. Many, while retaining
‘left’ attitudes, simply withdraw from political engagement, while others may
hold a mixture of progressive and conservative views, which would not preclude
their supporting a party further to the right than social democracy (the
extreme example being the phenomenon of white working class people voting for
neo-fascists when they feel they have been ‘abandoned’ by their traditional
party).
While there has been a small increase in electoral support for
non-mainstream parties (of the right as well as the left), a more marked trend
has been decreasing voter turn-out, suggesting a disillusionment with electoral
politics as such – fed, I would argue, by the increasing consensus among social-democratic,
liberal and conservative/Christian-democratic parties, particularly over
economic policy (see Table 2, which demonstrates that there has been a clear
downward trend in voter participation since the 1970s in almost all the major
capitalist democracies).
Table
2: Average percentage turn-out, by decade, in national elections since the
1970s
|
|
1970s |
1980s |
1990s |
2000s |
|
Canada |
74.6 |
73.3 |
68.3 |
63.7 |
|
France |
79.0 |
76.6 |
72.2 |
70.7 |
|
Denmark |
88.4 |
86.7 |
84.3 |
85.8 |
|
Fed Rep Germany |
90.9 |
87.3 |
79.7 |
78.4 |
|
Finland |
75.4 |
76.7 |
70.0 |
72.0 |
|
Ireland |
76.6 |
72.7 |
67.3 |
62.6 |
|
Japan |
71.0 |
68.8 |
61.0 |
62.7 |
|
Netherlands |
85.8 |
83.5 |
76.0 |
79.6 |
|
New Zealand |
83.8 |
91.4 |
85.9 |
77.0 |
|
Norway |
81.6 |
83.1 |
77.1 |
75.5 |
|
Portugal |
87.5 |
78.0 |
65.7 |
63.7 |
|
Spain |
73.6 |
73.4 |
76.9 |
72.2 |
|
Sweden |
90.4 |
89.1 |
85.0 |
80.1 |
|
UK |
75.0 |
74.1 |
74.7 |
60.4 |
|
USA[6] |
68.6 |
67.9 |
61.8 |
69.8 |
Average
percentage turnout of registered voters in all national legislative (and, where
applicable, presidential) elections held in each decade in the major capitalist
democracies (excluding those with compulsory voting). Sources: BBC; Election Resources on the Internet;
Elections Canada; Elections New Zealand; House of Commons Research Papers;
International IDEA; Statistics
Norway; Statistics Sweden; US Census Bureau; Wikipedia.
On the other hand, the residual mass support for social-democratic
parties remains substantial, not least in those areas with the strongest
history of working class organisation. Within this base of support there will
be those who continue to vote for ‘their’ historic party despite their
disenchantment with its recent political trajectory; those who have been
convinced that this trajectory is necessary and perhaps even desirable; and
those who continue to give their support out of a sense of almost tribal
loyalty, bolstered by an appreciation of the real social gains won by these
parties in the past. Nevertheless, the compound of these elements remains
strong; on present trends, it may be gradually eroded over a period of
generations but it will take more powerful forces than those presently at work
to break it down altogether.
It is worth considering some of the likely explanations as to why there
has not been a more decisive and general break with social democracy.
First, there is a question as to how widely it is recognised that social
democracy has shifted to the right and adopted policies inimical to working
class interests. For all those labour movement activists and loyal voters who
ever based their hopes for a better future on conference exhortations and
manifesto promises, the change since the 1970s is all too evident. Yet most
people are more concerned with what parties do in government than with what they may declare in their programmes
and policy documents. And the fact is that social democracy in government
rarely represented as sharp a contrast to the policies of conservative or
liberal governments as their respective ideologies and party programmes might
have suggested. To say this is not simply to belittle, once again, the
achievements of the parliamentary left, but to recognise that the policies of
the right and centre, too, were once a good deal more progressive than they are
today. For example: while
Britain’s post-war Labour government nationalised large parts of the energy,
transport and communications sectors, plus iron and steel and the Bank of
England, similar measures were carried out by coalitions dominated by bourgeois
parties in France and Austria; in all cases, nationalisation was seen as a
means of strengthening capitalism, not of beginning its transformation into
socialism. Conversely, majority social-democratic governments in Sweden and
Norway carried out no nationalisation at all.[7] Similarly, the progressive tax rates
introduced by Labour governments in the 1960s are often recalled (usually with
horror, by bourgeois commentators) but it is less frequently remembered that
the top rate of income tax under Eisenhower’s Republican administration in the
United States was 91 per cent.[8] Governments of right as well as left sought
to maintain full employment and adopted Keynesian demand-management techniques
to moderate the effects of the trade cycle.
Conversely, governments nominally of left, right and centre alike have,
since the 1970s, adopted the free-market nostrums of neo-liberalism. While
working class voters can hardly be indifferent to the impact of this – massive
public spending cuts, greater economic insecurity, reduced employment rights,
etc. – they would not necessarily hold social-democratic parties specially
responsible, particularly when the latter’s version of neo-liberalism is
usually a little milder than that implemented by right-wing governments.
Political activists and industrial militants judge parties of the left by the
yardstick of their declared socialist objectives; the majority of working class
voters are more likely to base their expectations on those parties’ recent
behaviour in government, and consequently to expect less. When ‘their’ party
disregards their interests so flagrantly as to forfeit their vote, they are
more likely to conclude that politicians as
such cannot be trusted and to abstain from electoral politics altogether
(see Table 2) than to demand a new socialist party, re-founded on the original
principles now betrayed by the old.
A further, related, point is that the proponents of new left parties
tend to underestimate the scepticism that exists about the viability of a
socialist alternative. However unappealing the neo-liberal policies of recent
years may be to large numbers of people, there is widespread acceptance of the
idea that there is no realistic alternative – or, at least, none that involves
asserting social control over capital and the market. The latter are held to be
impracticable either on economic grounds (because of ‘globalisation’ –
specifically, the increased mobility of capital, supported by the policing role
of the WTO et al) or on political grounds (the supposed electoral unpopularity
of higher personal taxation, etc.). It is hardly surprising that such views
should be so widely held, given their assiduous promotion over the last 20-30
years by the mass media, bourgeois economists and other ‘experts’ and the
mainstream political parties (including the social democrats). Moreover, there
is a rational core to such ideas, since the only alternative to neo-liberalism
that most people in the advanced capitalist countries have experienced was the
Keynesian welfare state that existed in most of these countries from 1945 until
the 1970s or early 1980s. This model depended on stable capital accumulation to
provide the high tax yields that financed its comparatively generous social
spending and it therefore became unviable from the mid-1970s when capitalism
went into a deep and lengthy recession. Moreover, it was often bureaucratic,
unresponsive and economically inefficient; in associating the idea of socialism
in the popular mind with this regime of welfare capitalism (or with the Soviet
bloc), the bourgeoisie and its apologists have done much to undermine it as an
attractive alternative model of society.
Finally, there is the obvious point that parties and movements of the
socialist left rarely receive anything approaching fair or even-handed treatment
from the mainstream media in capitalist societies, for reasons that should not
need to be spelt out. Moves to establish left alternatives to social democracy
are likely to be ignored, ridiculed or denounced. Of course, it was ever thus,
but at the beginning of the 20th century, when the first socialist parties were
getting off the ground, the reliance on the mass media for information was less
pronounced than it is today. Conversely, it may be argued, we have today a
profusion of alternative media sources, via the internet. While this
undoubtedly represents a huge benefit, which has transformed the possibilities
for communicating socialist ideas, those ideas have to compete with thousands
of alternatives in cyberspace. Moreover, there remains a significant ‘digital
divide’, even in the most affluent countries and regions, and it is working
class people who are most likely to be on the wrong side of that divide.
To point out these significant obstacles is not to counsel despair about
the possibility of building mass socialist parties – just to promote a fuller
appreciation of the difficulties that lie ahead. Nor should it be inferred that
continuing indefinitely to worry away at social democracy’s left flank is
ultimately a more viable option. The rightward trajectory of the mass parties,
if it continues at the present rate, will soon leave socialists without an
environment capable of supporting any left politics. What is needed is a
political approach that is both dynamic and realistic: one that takes account
of the changed political landscape and advances a clear strategy for relating
to social forces as they actually are. I will make some suggestions about this
later on; first I will touch on the theoretical dimension of these questions.
Bourgeois parties,
workers’ parties and bourgeois workers’ parties
The arguments for a break with social democracy are often presented in
what purports to be the scientific language of Marxist class analysis: what
were once workers’ parties, we are told, can no longer be considered as such
because they have undergone a change in their ‘class character’. For all their
pretensions to analytical precision, however, these arguments lack clarity
about what determines a party’s ‘class character’.
There are two respects in which a party could meaningfully be described
as a ‘workers’ party’: it could be for
the workers – i.e., dedicated to the pursuit of their class interests – and/or
it could be of the workers – i.e.,
drawing its membership, organisation and electoral support from the working
class. In the pre-1914 period, parties like the German, Austrian and
Scandinavian social-democratic parties met both criteria: their social base was
almost uniformly proletarian and they were dedicated to the establishment of a
classless, socialist society. At any later period, there is more of a question
as to whether these parties’ politics were for
the workers, but their class base remained proletarian.[9] In this latter
characteristic, they have not fundamentally changed even today. In most
countries, a majority (or, at least, a plurality) of class-conscious workers
still identifies with these parties, votes for them and sometimes even joins
them. Admittedly, the numbers are smaller, and declining, but this is a matter
of degree, not kind. It is also argued that workers make up a smaller
proportion of social-democratic voters and members than they did in the past.
This is probably true to an extent, as the occupational structure of advanced
capitalist societies has changed, creating more intermediate layers in the
class structure. But unless one identifies the working class very narrowly with
manual workers, as few serious Marxists (other than Nicos Poulantzas) have
done,[10] then the continuing social weight of the working class means that it
is bound to account for the bulk of the social-democratic base.
If, then, the social-democratic parties still qualify as workers’
parties in terms of their social base, there is nevertheless the question of
their politics, which have clearly developed in a reactionary direction. As I
have observed above, however, this has been a gradual process. We need to
consider at what stage in this process – if at all – we could say that social
democracy decisively committed itself to the class interests of the
bourgeoisie, as opposed to those of the proletariat. In terms of concrete
policies, there can hardly have been a decision more inimical to working class
interests than sending millions of workers to their deaths in the trenches in
1914, yet the leaders of most social-democratic parties supported this
decision, at a time when they were still formally committed to the abolition of
capitalism. Moreover, many of the same parties subsequently implemented reforms
that did benefit the working class.
It might be argued that a significant marker of these parties’ changing class
character has been their own relinquishment of any special allegiance or
orientation to the working class. Again, this has not happened, in most cases,
‘overnight’, but by a gradual process, whereby the language of class has been
downgraded and then quietly dropped.[11] Even where the change has been made in
a decisive and explicit manner – most notably, by the northern European social
democrats, which dropped their self-description as workers’ parties in the
1950s, becoming instead catch-all ‘people’s parties’[12] – the practical
significance of the change was questionable; certainly it did not appreciably
lessen these parties’ working class support, nor did it provoke major splits to
the left at the time. Arguably more significant has been these parties’
adoption, since the 1970s, of neo-liberal economic policies, which represented
a disavowal of any idea that the working class might have legitimate interests
of its own which conflicted with the demands and priorities of capital. Even
this, however, has not provoked a general and decisive political break from
social democracy by substantial sections of the working class. This last point
underlines the fact that the attitude taken by a political party towards the
working class is less important than the attitude that the class takes towards
the party. Even where parties which once extolled the workers’ cause now treat
them with contempt, while substantial numbers of workers maintain some allegiance
towards those parties there is at least an argument for socialists to continue
to relate to those parties, in order to engage with those workers.
The altered class character of the mass parties has been asserted all
the more vigorously in the case of those, like the British and Australian
Labour parties, whose relationship with socialism was always more tenuous than
that of, say, the German SPD or the Swedish SAP. The phrase, ‘bourgeois
workers’ party’, attributed to Lenin,[13] has often been invoked to express the
contradictory character of such parties: bourgeois politics coupled with a
working class social base. Now, it is argued, this contradiction has been
resolved and they have become bourgeois parties, pure and simple. Again, this
argument is not as coherent as it may first appear. The politics of the ‘bourgeois workers’ parties’ may now be more
unequivocally ‘bourgeois’ than before but if they were already politically (as opposed to socially) ‘bourgeois’,[14] then
this change is a matter of degree, not of kind, and hardly amounts to a change
in class character. Moreover, their social base remains qualitatively
unchanged; to the extent that they were ever workers’ parties, they remain so,
by virtue of their subjective identification as such by millions of working
class people.
In any case, assigning political parties to the ‘correct’ analytical
category is clearly far less important than making a concrete analysis of their
relationship with real social forces and the potential for working with or within
them. There will be circumstances when socialists should work, in the short
term, even within unequivocally bourgeois parties, where particular leaders or
factions within these parties have established a working class base (for
example: there might be a case for supporting local election campaigns by
left-ish US Democratic Party politicians, where these have a local base in the
black or Latino communities). In reality, assessments of the class character of
political parties by far left often have more to do with practical questions
(such as those groups’ prospects for winning support) than with questions of
high theory. It would be better to acknowledge this openly, to facilitate a
more useful discussion of strategy and tactics.
Socialists in search
of a social base
The practical corollary of the debate about party-building is that
socialists are confronted with two distinct and counterposed types of potential
constituency. On the one hand, there is the mass of people – overwhelmingly
working class, or at one or two removes from the working class – who maintain a
historically-grounded sense of identification with the main social-democratic
or labour party in their country. Some of them will be party members or strong
sympathisers and may have a degree of influence as opinion-formers within their
union branches, workplaces and/or communities; the majority, however, will not
be politically active other than on election day. Even among those who are
party members, the exclusive form of political activity, beyond the organised
left – a minority of a minority – will be campaigning for parliamentary and
municipal elections. Yet however passive such a constituency, it cannot be
sidestepped on the road to socialism – not least because of its relative size –
and, indeed, it will contain thousands of activists and foot-soldiers whose
support will be indispensable to the success of any socialist project.
On the other hand, there are the growing numbers of people who may be
considered ‘naturally’ predisposed – by social background or past allegiance –
to support the left, but who no longer retain any party affiliation. Again,
this category comprises a wide spectrum, in terms of degrees of political
engagement. At one extreme, there are those who have made no conscious decision
to withhold their support from the social-democratic party; rather, they have
abstained by default – exemplifying a process of collective political
disengagement within certain sections of society (especially among young
people). At the opposite end of the spectrum are those very politically-minded
people – often trade union or community activists – who have positively
resolved to deny their support to a party that seems to have betrayed their
interests or values. Between the two extremes there are large numbers of people
who have gradually lost the inclination to line up behind a party with which
they feel a decreasing affinity.
Ultimately, socialists will need to engage the most
politically-conscious elements from both these groups. In their immediate political activity, however,
they have to make a choice as to where they are going to prioritise their
efforts at building mass support. The approach required, in terms of propaganda
and tactics, will be very different if the focus is on the mainstream
social-democratic base than if it is on those who are already breaking with
social democracy. If socialists are going to concentrate on the mainstream of
social-democratic workers, with the intention of breaking them from their
current right-wing leaders, this will probably require continuing to work in or
around the social-democratic parties, so as to engage their members in
comradely debate about the need to reverse the current trajectory of these
parties in order to defend historic values and achievements. On the other hand,
if the priority is to be those who have already given up on social democracy,
then the emphasis will be on denouncing the inability or unwillingness of the
social-democratic parties to defend workers’ interests and countering any idea
that these parties can be ‘reclaimed’.
The second approach has, over the last ten years or so, been more
favoured by a majority of the organised Marxist left, particularly in such
countries as France, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Britain, Australia, and latterly
Germany. The rationale is straightforward: although usually still a fairly
small – if growing – minority of the working class, those who have already
become disillusioned with social democracy are more likely to be open to an
alternative. They are often portrayed as the ‘vanguard’ of the class, impelled
to take a leading role by a clear appreciation of their interests, which the
broad masses are slower to grasp.
New movements and old
Those working class voters who continue to support social-democratic
parties, even while the latter are abandoning their historic commitments and
attacking workers’ interests, may appear – by virtue of this stubborn
attachment – to represent a comparatively conservative section of the class, in
contrast to those who have been radicalised by the experience of betrayal by
their ‘own’ party. This is not the whole story, however. As noted above, such
people vote the way they do with varying degrees of enthusiasm, resignation or
desperation. Moreover, the persistent adherence of workers to social-democratic
parties cannot be dismissed as mere conservatism. To give continuing political
support to a party on the basis that it is in some sense a ‘workers’ party’
represents, in itself, a form of class consciousness – notwithstanding any
illusions about the political role of such parties that such an allegiance may
also reflect. And, like any form of class consciousness, it is based on collective ideas: on the shared
experience, and agreed interpretation, of social relations.
The implications of this must be taken seriously by anyone with a
commitment to class politics. For all their political failings, the
social-democratic parties (and, in some countries, the Communist parties) have
unquestionably enjoyed mass working class support lasting several decades.
Moreover, we are not talking here merely about the aggregate of thousands of
atomised individual decisions by voters: it is collective support, organised as such – whether formally, through
party branches or affiliated union bodies, or informally, through social
networks in workplaces and neighbourhoods (this is the concrete meaning of the
phrase ‘working class base’, reduced to an empty cliché by the
hack-propagandists of the far left). And any party capable of advancing the struggle
for socialism today would surely need a comparable base – in size and
character. This raises some very important questions about how the left should
go about building political parties.
First of all, the experience of the mass workers’ parties during the
20th century presents positive examples (the construction of organisations that
mobilised many thousands of people) as well as negative ones (the failure of
these parties, outside the Soviet Union and its satellites, to hasten the
demise of capitalism). Today’s left needs to separate the positive from the
negative, if it is to integrate the lessons of past experience into a political
strategy for socialist advance in the 21st century. In a nutshell, how can we
build workers’ parties today that command the mass support enjoyed by their
predecessors a century ago, but which avoid the political degeneration that
those parties underwent? To what extent does the relationship between party and
class that sustained the historic workers’ parties need to be reproduced as the
basis of a renewed socialist project? Must the structures and networks that
these parties retain even today – albeit in a somewhat withered form – be taken
over wholesale by a new socialist leadership? Or can a similar relationship be
replicated by a new organisation? How far should we aim to establish a different kind of relationship between
party and class, given the weakness of most such parties’ pursuit of workers’
interests, once in parliament and government? To what extent can the failure of
such parties to win socialism be attributed to their character as parties, and
to what extent to the character of the capitalist states in which they
operated: the structures and pressures of parliamentary democracy and
government? These are the questions that the left needs to address, for they go
to the heart of the strategic considerations involved in the establishment of a
viable mass socialist party today.
At the most practical level, there is a need for a clear approach to
recruitment. Outside periods of mass radicalisation associated with major
social struggles – such as the immediate aftermaths of the two world wars, or
the years between the événements of May ’68 and the Portuguese
Revolution – revolutionary parties tend to acquire members in ones and twos,
often from a student or intellectual milieu, and on the basis of the
attractiveness of a worldview that provides a neatly comprehensive explanation
for such unsettling social phenomena as recessions and wars. Conversely, the
mass reformist parties have historically recruited people in far larger numbers
– often several at once from the same workplace or neighbourhood – around
election campaigns and/or concrete issues of immediate tangible significance,
especially at a local level. The enormity of the task of rebuilding the
socialist movement today is such that we cannot rely on the individual
recruitment of the ideologically committed. We are not simply recruiting
revolutionary cadre to provide leadership to the massed ranks of class-conscious
social-democratic workers; the decline of the mass parties means that there is
a much bigger gap to be filled – whether that is done, in the first instance,
inside or outside the old parties. We therefore need a ‘primitive accumulation’
of members, something that can only be achieved by appealing to their class
interests at the most concrete level.
In this regard, there are problems both with building new parties and
with trying to revive the left within the existing mass parties. On the one
hand, it is difficult to persuade people to defend their interests by joining a
party that currently seems singularly indifferent, or even hostile, to those
interests. On the other hand, it is perhaps equally challenging to convince
someone to invest their hopes in a party that is small, untested and liable to
be dismissed as cranky and marginal by the political establishment.
But this is not merely a practical question about selecting an approach
that will yield the most fruitful results; it goes to the heart of class
politics. If the unique status of the working class as revolutionary subject
remains valid – because it alone consistently has the motive and the potential
means for disposing of capitalism – then a party that seeks to turn that
potential into a conscious force for socialist change must address it as a class. Historically, the trade
unions, the mass parties and the other institutions of the workers’ movement
organised workers into a conscious, collective political actor, instilling or
reinforcing class loyalties that might otherwise have been eclipsed by
national, regional, ethnic or religious affiliations. In the early period of
the workers’ movement, this was aided by the rapid growth of new industries
that created self-contained, close-knit communities – mill towns, mining
districts and the like – forging strong bonds of solidarity. Relatively
quickly, the movement developed its own culture and infrastructure, with values
and institutions distinct from those of official, bourgeois society, and strong
enough to sustain a sense of identification that could be reproduced within
each new generation. Yet the industries that provided the bedrock of the
workers’ movement throughout most of the 20th century have declined or
relocated to the ‘Newly-Industrialising Countries’ of the Pacific Rim et al.
Contrary to the claims of conventional bourgeois discourse, the working class
in the advanced capitalist countries has not disappeared: it has simply
transferred to new occupations and sectors, often – like the burgeoning call
centre industry – every bit as alienating as the ‘dark, satanic mills’ of early
industrialisation.
On this basis, it should – in principle – be possible for workers in
these industries to be organised and, moreover, for them to be won to a class
politics that goes beyond immediate industrial demands, in the same way that
their forebears were. In practice, however, the barriers to this are clearly
greater than they were a century, or even 30 years, ago. The decline of
traditional heavy industries in the advanced capitalist countries since the
1970s has been accompanied by other social and political developments that have
weakened the working class vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie. Trade union membership
has been drastically reduced. Neo-liberal economic policies have eroded the
public sphere, reducing the number of social relations that are not regulated
by the market, and this has been reinforced by the entrenchment of
neo-liberalism as ‘official’ ideology, presenting individualism and atomisation
as the natural, inevitable and desirable basis of human society. For their
part, the social-democratic leaders have increasingly abandoned any concept of
class (other than in a trivial sense, relating to matters of status and
lifestyle) – along with the idea that there are any significant social actors beyond individuals and families (and,
of course, businesses). All this, combined with other factors that stem from
different causes – such as the growth of home-based popular entertainment –
means that there has been a general decline in collective social engagement,
and not just in the industrial and political spheres (a phenomenon lamented by
the liberal US academic Robert Putnam in his celebrated book, Bowling Alone). As a political movement
based on the principles of collective interests and collective action,
socialism is naturally at a disadvantage in such an environment. The leadership
of social democracy has played a particularly regressive role in this respect:
in denying the political saliency of class, it has actively disorganised the working class. The left
needs to overcome this by re-connecting the ideas of class politics with the
experiences of working people.
How viable left
parties are built
There are two aspects to this: first, engaging with the existing forms
of working class political organisation; and second, developing a longer-term
strategy for rebuilding a socialist movement based on class politics. To take
the first of these: a new or revived socialist party can only be built from
within the existing workers’ movements. The latter, for all their
bureaucratisation and failures of leadership, are the product of workers’
struggles over many decades; their structures and networks – however withered
they might have become – are the embodiment of the principle of workers’
self-organisation and must be the starting-point for any serious attempt to
reconstruct the left. This relates not only to the trade unions but also to the
mass parties and necessitates a battle by the socialist left within, and for
control over, their structures. It will frequently be the case that there is no
realistic chance of the left winning overall control of these parties;
nevertheless it is only by addressing working people within the organisations
that they themselves have built that socialists can secure any hope of winning
their political allegiance. If and when the left judges that it can make no
further headway within the established parties, it must be able to split these
parties from top to bottom, regrouping a section of the acknowledged political
leadership, as well as the rank-and-file.
This is borne out by the experience of those new left parties that have
been established over the last 15-20 years, as social democracy has embraced
neo-liberal policies. The only such parties that have established themselves as
a viable, visible presence in national politics, with a mass membership and a
robust electoral base, have been Spain’s Izquierda
Unida (United Left) and the Italian Partito
della Rifondazione Comunista (Party of Communist Refoundation). In Germany,
Die Linkspartei (the Left Party) has
made a promising start, which it will hopefully be able to maintain.
Izquierda Unida (IU) – a broad coalition, rather than a
unified party – was formed in 1986 on the initiative of the Spanish Communist
Party (PCE), out of the forces involved in the campaign against Spanish
membership of Nato: a collection of mostly small, socialist, republican and
green groups. For several years, IU made significant progress, winning support
electorally and in the unions at the expense of the Socialist Party (PSOE),
which was pursuing a neo-liberal economic agenda. It topped nine per cent of
the vote in the 1989 general election, boosted by a significant role in the
previous year’s general strike, and won almost 11 per cent (2,600,000 votes) in
1996, when the Socialist government was displaced by the right-wing Partido Popular. From 1999, however, it
went into decline, its support slipping to five per cent in 2000 – despite an
electoral pact with the PSOE – and it achieved a similar result four years
later. Waning support and a lack of clarity about its political project have
led to protracted internal strife in IU, involving the departure of almost
every founding organisation apart from the PCE. Nevertheless, it has
historically achieved a degree of support unrivalled by most similar
formations; even today it has five parliamentary seats and more than 2,500
councillors, and claims to have some 70,000 activists.
The Partito della Rifondazione Comunista was established
in 1991 by a number of opposition currents from the Italian Communist Party
(PCI), following the PCI leadership’s decision to transform the party into the
‘post-communist’ Partito della
Democratica Sinistra (PDS). These currents included the pro-Soviet group
led by Armando Cossutta, which broke away in 1998 to form the Party of Italian
Communists, and a more numerous ‘left-Eurocommunist’ group – the followers of
Pietro Ingrao (although he himself remained in the PDS until 1993) – as well as
others further to the left. In addition, Rifondazione
was joined at the very outset by Democrazia
Proletaria, the only substantial remaining far left party in Italy,
consisting of ex-Maoists and Trotskyists. Within ten years of its foundation, Rifondazione had some 100,000 members –
most of whom had not belonged to the old PCI – and a particular base in the
historical strongholds of the Italian left, such as Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. It enjoys strong
support within the biggest Italian union confederation, the CGIL, as well as in
smaller radical union centres such as COBAS. Moreover, it has engaged
effectively with young anti-globalisation activists – especially around the
Genoa demonstrations in 2001 and the European Social Forum in Florence the
following year. It has usually won between five and seven per cent of the vote
in national elections, reaching its high point in 1996, when it won over three
million votes: 8.5 per cent of the total. Following the recent elections, it
has 27 Senators and 41 members of the Chamber of Deputies, as well as five
MEPs.[15]
The German Linkspartei has
been the most dramatic success story of the various new left formations, having
made a substantial electoral impact before it has even been fully established
as a party. At the moment, it remains an alliance between two bodies: the Party
of Democratic Socialism (PDS), successor to the ruling party of the GDR; and a
recent split from the SPD, called the Electoral Alternative for Work and Justice (WASG). Since German reunification in 1990,
the PDS had polled between 2.4 per cent and 5.1 per cent of the national vote
but had much greater support in the East, where it had won up to ten per cent
and was a junior coalition partner in two state governments. The WASG was
established in 2004 by members of the SPD and trade union left, in opposition
to the Schröder government’s welfare ‘reform’ measures, ‘Agenda 2010’ and
‘Hartz IV’, which included attacks on unemployment benefit, pensions and
workers’ rights. The WASG was boosted in May 2005 by the defection from the SPD
of Oskar Lafontaine, former party chair and finance minister; by the time of
the election in September, it had 12,000 members. The Linkspartei stood in the election on a platform of progressive tax
rises to fund a more generous welfare state. It won eight per cent of the vote
(25 per cent in the East and five per cent in the West), securing 54 seats in
the Bundestag – the first time in the
postwar Federal Republic that there has been representation for any party to
the left of the SPD, apart from the Greens, who have drifted rightward in
recent years. The two sections of the Linkspartei
are now confronting the process of full merger and deciding how to build on their
initial success.[16]
All of these parties have been based on significant sections of the
pre-existing organised left: either splits from long-established mass parties
or existing parties, in their entirety, serving as the core of a regroupment of
broader forces. In this way, such parties have been able to demonstrate that
they are a legitimate offshoot of the mass workers’ movement, rooted in
workplaces and communities and headed by leaders who have proven their mettle
in the class struggle. This has allowed them to take with them a significant
portion of the membership, organisational resources and electoral support of
the parties from which they have originated, and/or which they have sought to
challenge.
By contrast, other new left parties have been formed by self-styled
revolutionary groups on the fringes of the mass workers’ movement, with their
membership largely limited to the combined membership of these organisations
and their periphery. Their argument has been that large initial political resources
would be unnecessary, because the abandonment by the social democrats of the
interests of working people, and any real commitment to social justice, had
created a strong current of opinion in the workers’ movement and broader
society that they could harness. In practice, however, they have usually failed
to make a significant impact, in electoral terms or by any other measure of
political influence. Of course, some of these parties have had more success
than others: the Red-Green Alliance in Denmark, launched by the country’s
Communist, Maoist and Trotskyist parties, has won parliamentary representation
and a membership more than double that of its combined founder organisations.
In France, an alliance of two Trotskyist groups, the LCR and Lutte Ouvrière, won five seats in the
European Parliament in 1999 (losing them, however, at the following election).
These, however, are the exceptions, and even these initiatives have fallen a
long way short of becoming a significant challenge to social democracy.
Left ‘recomposition’
in Britain: a brief history
Britain has had more than its fair share of these new left parties over
the last decade or so. The first, Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party
(SLP), might have had the best chance of establishing itself as a viable
alternative to New Labour, as it had a genuine base in the trade unions
(notably the NUM and RMT) and could credibly present itself as the authentic
left of the mainstream labour movement – rather than simply a marginal far left
group. Its own leadership, however, systematically destroyed its chances.
First, the party was launched at the wrong time: two years before a general
election at which a majority of progressive people in Britain were willing to
put aside any doubts about New Labour in order to remove the hated Tories.
Second, the rationale for its foundation – i.e., the notion that by rewriting
Clause 4 of its constitution, Labour had ceased to be a ‘socialist party’ – was
based on the false premise that an issue of party programme would be of
significant concern to working people in general, rather than just political
activists. Finally, the dictatorial regime established by Scargill drove out
huge swathes of the party’s original membership and stultified its internal
culture, reducing it to an empty shell. No sooner had the SLP’s star begun to
wane, than along came the next attempt to establish a political challenge to
New Labour: the Socialist Alliance. This, however, represented little more than
a pooling of resources by Britain’s various (and mostly tiny) far left groups,
as was reflected by its meagre showing in the 2001 general election. By
contrast, its Caledonian cousin, the Scottish Socialist Party, had been built
up gradually on the basis of serious interventions in mass struggles – notably
the anti-Poll Tax campaign and the struggle for a Scottish Parliament – and
incorporated some small but not insignificant splinters from the Labour Party:
the Scottish Socialist Movement and Scottish Militant Labour. Its electoral
performance was correspondingly better than that of its comrades south of the
border, especially in the 2003 Scottish parliamentary elections, when it won
six seats. Its poor showing in the 2005 general election, however, has cast
doubt on its long-term potential as a significant political force.
Respect was launched by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and its allies
as the successor to the Socialist Alliance, on the basis that the anti-war
movement had created a huge popular constituency that cried out for an organised
political expression. In some respects, it is an advance on the Socialist
Alliance. First, its membership is clearly not confined to the far left.
Moreover, in seeking to relate to a mass political movement that has mobilised
millions of ordinary people – and by doing so in a language of concrete demands
and clear aspirations – it has lifted itself above the subterranean ghetto of
the far left. It has, predictably, been attacked in all the usual quarters for
eschewing a ‘revolutionary’ programme and for not consistently placing
socialism at the forefront of its propaganda. This criticism seems, however, to
be based on the strange belief that building a mass socialist party is a matter
of setting sufficiently stringent ideological preconditions for membership –
rather than patiently attempting to win people over on the basis of agreement
on an initially limited set of issues. The condemnation of Respect for
appealing to Muslims as Muslims also seems to me a little
ill-conceived: at a time when their religious and cultural community is being
demonised by politicians and the media as a den of terrorists and
fundamentalist bigots, Muslims as such
surely have legitimate interests, if only in defending themselves against
persecution. The ‘War on Terrorism’ has undoubtedly radicalised large numbers
of Muslims and socialists should surely be trying to ensure that politically
progressive conclusions are drawn – rather than the reactionary obscurantism
that is on offer from the genuine fundamentalists. Socialists will not win
support from Muslims by preaching to them, however, but only by engaging in a
genuine dialogue that acknowledges that lessons can be learnt by the white
European left from the cultural and political practices of the embattled
minority communities in our midst.
A more fitting criticism of the Respect leadership in this regard is
that their attitude to their Muslim supporters is rather opportunistic: they
seem principally interested in alliances with Muslim political and community
leaders as a means of ‘getting out the vote’ and are consequently unconcerned
about the political credentials of those prepared to work with them.
Furthermore, Respect is in danger of becoming an almost exclusively Muslim
party at the electoral level: the overwhelming majority of its votes in the
2005 general election and the 2006 local elections came from Muslim communities
in east London and, to a lesser extent, the Midlands. Moreover, Respect has
made little headway among other ethnic and religious minorities, including
non-Muslim Asians, despite the fact that these latter are barely less
susceptible to racism and Islamophobia than actual Muslims. The party is not,
in practice, therefore, a voice for oppressed minorities in general – just one
in particular.
The anti-globalisation
movement as a new revolutionary subject?
The confinement of Respect’s voter base to little more than a section of
the Muslim community illustrates the difficulties inherent in trying to build a
political party out of a single-issue movement, however important that issue
might be. The significance of the campaign to stop the Iraq war – and
particularly the unprecedented international demonstrations on February 15,
2003 – is that it united millions of people who did not necessarily agree on
very much else. While many of those people will undoubtedly have experienced a
dramatic change in their worldview as a consequence of that campaign, probably
far more will have largely retained the views on other issues that they held
before. The SWP and George Galloway imagined that the war would serve as an
epiphany for millions of people in Britain, illustrating the links between
imperialism abroad and privatisation, inequality and racism at home. This
revelation would galvanise long-term activists who had become increasingly
disenchanted, along with countless others who had previously remained
quiescent; they would see that the only path to a truly progressive politics
involved building a new party that would sweep New Labour away. Notwithstanding
a handful of electoral gains, things have evidently not gone quite to plan.
The potential of popular protest movements to serve as a new agency of
political change was already being proclaimed by many on the left before the
‘War on Terrorism’ even began. The stormy confrontation between a broad
coalition of demonstrators and the forces of the US state outside the WTO
meeting in Seattle in 1999 suggested that powerful new forces were moving to
challenge the supremacy of international capital, for the first time since the
end of the Cold War. The fact that the protestors’ demands called into question
the supposedly ineluctable logic of capitalist globalisation, and the presence
of trade union delegations as well as student-based ‘global justice’
organisations, seemed particularly promising. Despite similarly tempestuous
protests outside further gatherings of the international ruling class – notably
in Gothenburg and Genoa – the union presence has, however, never subsequently
been as significant as in Seattle. Moreover, the idea that such a disparate and
chaotic movement could be forged into a unified, organised political force now
seems a little misplaced – despite the efforts of the British SWP and its
international co-thinkers to assert their hegemony via the establishment of
Globalise Resistance. The ‘movement’ always comprised a wide political
spectrum, from liberal and faith-based groups seeking fairly specific reforms
(such as the write-off of Third World Debt) to anarchists and semi-anarchists,
like the Wombles or Reclaim the Streets.
To say this is in no way to deny the significance of such a furious
upsurge of opposition to the worst excesses of the bourgeoisie, just when it
thought that the collapse of the Soviet bloc had made the world safe for
capitalism once again. The Marxist left has much to learn from the passion and
ingenuity of the ‘global justice’ and anti-war movements and from the ability
of key thinkers like Naomi Klein to convey radical insights to a wide audience.
Nevertheless, these forces represent an unwieldy tool with which to attack the
rule of capital. Moreover, to assign a leading role in anti-capitalist struggle
to a movement with no necessary link to the working class is to necessitate
rethinking the Marxist concept of revolutionary agency and no-one yet seems to
have gone further than suggesting that the anti-globalisation movement and the
workers’ organisations be somehow welded together. (Rifondazione did make some headway in this regard but now seems to
have pulled back somewhat from its orientation to the anti-globalisation
movement and re-focused on more conventional modes of left politics.) There
have, in the last couple of years, been specific campaigns which have brought
together unions representing super-exploited Third World workers and
anti-globalisation activists in the imperialist countries – ‘No Sweat’ being a
prominent example. Nevertheless, the appeal of such campaigns to their
constituency in the ‘First’ World has been based largely on individual moral
outrage, rather than collective material interests. As long as the labour
movement does not organise workers in a truly international way, this will
continue to be a stumbling block. Nevertheless, there have been some promising
developments for international class unity, such as the recent Latino-led
immigrant workers’ rights movement in the United States: a national/class
uprising by ‘Third World’ workers right in the heart of the hegemonic
imperialist state. It is to be hoped that such phenomena will increasingly
bring the global class struggle ‘back home’ in the coming years. In the
meantime, the sectional attitudes and limited political horizons prevalent
among large sections of the working class in the advanced capitalist countries
remain a problem to be overcome.
Class politics and
the united front
The foregoing discussion focuses more heavily on the obstacles to the
renewal of the socialist project in the workers’ movement than on the
opportunities that present themselves. This is a necessary corrective to the
tendency elsewhere on the Marxist left to seize on short cuts that can
supposedly lift us out of the morass of defeat and disorientation into which we
have sunk over the last 20 years. It is particularly necessary to caution
against the tendency to launch new parties at every conceivable juncture. The
developments that have weakened the social-democratic parties have not left
untouched the political resources on which those parties were based. At a time
when class consciousness and socialist principles have been under such
sustained attack, it is imperative to seek to maintain the maximum unity of
class forces – although against this must be set the ongoing demoralisation
occasioned by living with a social-democratic leadership that is actually
attacking its class base. There is, of course, no failsafe formula that can
determine when is a suitable moment to risk launching new parties: the
circumstances of each country, and each conjuncture, are different.
Nevertheless, the examples of parties like Rifondazione
and Izquierda Unida demonstrate the
kind of resources that are necessary at a
minimum to ensure that such initiatives result in viable and effective
organisations. Moreover, even these parties have faltered in their pursuit of a
coherent socialist agenda.
Most importantly, even the capacity to maintain a significant socialist
party does not absolve us from the responsibility to relate, in a comradely
manner, to those sections of the working class that remain organised under
different leadership, particularly where social-democratic parties retain the
lion’s section of workers’ political allegiance. At a time when the left is
more splintered than at any time in its history, the united front approach is
essential, not just around specific concrete issues, but as a general approach
to political discussion and organisation. The ideal scenario would, of course,
be for all socialists and class-conscious workers to be organised in a single
party under principled, left-wing leadership – but since that is unlikely to
happen in the vast majority of countries for the foreseeable future, we need to
learn to work more productively across organisational boundaries, rather than
taking every opportunity to point out the ideological shortcomings of other
groups. Joint working by the left around specific issues is, of course,
essential and is already often a reality. But we need to recognise that the
socialist programme itself is not the exclusive property of any one party or
group and that ideas and proposals can and should be shared and developed by
the left collectively. A potentially positive step in this regard has been the
recent initiative by the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) to develop a
‘Left-Wing Programme’ that could be adopted by broad forces within the labour
movement,[17] in the same way that the Alternative Economic Strategy became a
common programme for much of the British left in the late 1970s and early 1980s
(itself echoing the French Socialist/Communist common programme of the early
1970s). We may disagree with the details (and even the name) of the CPB’s
initiative but the principle, at least, seems sound.
Beyond electoralism
The idea of a common programme for the socialist left cuts across the
current obsession with standing candidates for parliaments and local authorities,
often on the part of organisations that were once dismissive about the value of
electoral politics. It is somewhat ironic that, just as they have declared the
political bankruptcy of the social-democratic parties and sought to build a
political alternative, the organisations of the revolutionary left have
increasingly looked to electoral politics for the expression of that
alternative. The ability to stand candidates in opposition to those of the
social-democratic parties is treated as definitive evidence of the maturity of
a political challenge and its capacity to represent the working class. Of
course, elections are important for
the left, as a means of communicating our political ideas and securing support;
moreover, any realistic chance of winning office should not be lightly
dismissed. Yet any engagement by socialists in electoral politics should be
conducted in open acknowledgement of their limitations and with an awareness of
their inadequacy as an expression of class interests. To take part in elections
is to accept (even if only temporarily) the liberal-democratic political
framework, which denies the very existence of such interests and conceals the
existence of extra-governmental concentrations of class power.[18] In addition,
voting is ultimately an individual activity
and, as Perry Anderson observed 40 years ago:
‘. . . the Labour Party will never be able to unify the working class – or indeed any social group – behind it, as long as it tries to do so through the essentially serializing and isolating electoral mechanism. . . . By devoting all its energies to the single moment of the vote, the Labour Party necessarily suffers precisely at the vote – since it has neglected to build a more durable community which alone could create the basis for a solid and habitual victory at the polls.’[19]
What was true of the Labour party, in those far-off days when it still
seemed interested in governmental office for some purpose other than the
efficient stewardship of capitalism, should be even more apparent today to
socialists with less faith in parliamentarism. While election campaigns (at
best) provide an opportunity to mobilise large numbers of people on the basis
of explicitly political issues, focused on a clear, immediate and (in
principle) achievable goal, such an opportunity is likely to be short-lived.
Between elections, there is every danger that the energy and commitment
mobilised during the campaign will prove unsustainable. In the long run,
socialists can only build the movement by pursuing a consciously hegemonic
strategy, incorporating a much broader range of interventions, in areas of
social life far beyond what is narrowly conceived of as political.
Clearly, trade union activity is of crucial importance in this. Unions
are the most fundamental form of working class organisation and any revival of
class politics is virtually inconceivable without their central involvement. In
recent years, as social-democratic parties have accepted and even implemented
the neo-liberal agenda, the better-led unions have taken on an explicitly
political function. As the operations of the state have been ‘slimmed down’ and
commodified, public sector unions have played a particularly important role in
defending jobs, services and the very idea of a public sphere beyond the
influence of the market. On issues like water privatisation, which has provoked
popular struggles on every continent, unions have begun to share information
and link up their strategies on an international basis, leading coalitions of
community organisations that have often scored major successes against
corporate power. In any serious attempt to reconstruct the socialist movement –
whether within or outside existing parties – the active involvement, or at
least co-operation, of these unions will be essential.
But however effective the campaigning strategy of the unions, they have
limited opportunities to raise the political awareness of the majority of the
workforce that in almost all countries remains non-unionised. Union strategies
for organising ‘greenfield’ sectors, such as the call centre industry, are
obviously vitally important. An encouraging development in recent years –
particularly in North America – has been the growth of ‘reciprocal community
unionism’, whereby unions broaden the scope of their attention from the
workplace to the wider community and simultaneously engage the interest and
concern of that community with matters of labour process and employment
rights.[20] Such initiatives can ultimately play an important role in rehabilitating
the very concept of class as a significant social relationship, after several
years in which it has been excised from the vocabulary of mainstream political
discourse.
The importance of this task should not be underestimated. Few people
could travel far beyond their own front door without becoming aware of the
massive and growing inequalities that blight even the wealthiest societies, yet
the terms in which socialists of all stripes traditionally discussed, and
attempted to address, such phenomena must now seem totally alien to younger
people, in particular. In Britain, New Labour has deployed the concept of
‘social exclusion’ to suggest that inequality becomes intolerable only where it
reaches the extreme of preventing people from participating in civic life. As
Blair’s leading academic ideologue, Anthony Giddens, explains: ‘Exclusion is
not about gradations of inequality, but about mechanisms that act to detach
groups of people from the social mainstream.’[21] The determined efforts of the
bourgeois political, intellectual and media establishment have reduced such
concepts as redistribution as an end in
itself to quaint archaisms for many people beyond the depleted ranks of the
organised left. Socialists therefore have an important (re-)educative function
to perform in our political activities: raising awareness of the character and
extent of social inequality, condemning it for the social evil that it is and
setting out the means by which it might be remedied.[22] The same applies (for
example) to the notion of control of one’s labour and how this can be achieved
by collective action; and the principle of universal access to essential goods
and services as an absolute right, regardless of the ability to pay. These
ideas are the building blocks of a renewed class politics.
Back to the future
A hundred years ago, the new social-democratic, socialist and labour
parties in the advanced capitalist countries believed that history was on their
side. The increasing size, in both absolute and relative terms, of the
proletariat, and the grudging concession, by the ruling classes of these
countries, of a widening of the suffrage, led to confident predictions of the
inevitability of majority socialist governments, which would legislate away the
capitalist system. Yet, by the time that parties of the left were able to form
majority governments for the first time – generally after the Second World
War[23] – they had moderated their goals and sought only to ameliorate
capitalism, rather than to abolish it altogether. The best the working class
could hope for was that its interests would be given equivalent consideration
to those of the bourgeoisie and that a harmonious class compromise would be
secured. One of the most popular explanations for this turnaround – advanced
not only by bourgeois commentators but by Marxists or semi-Marxists like Adam
Przeworski – is that the working class never did account for a majority of the
electorate and that social democratic parties therefore had to adopt a
cross-class orientation, which involved watering down their programme, in order
to secure an electoral majority.[24]
This certainly reflects the thinking of these parties’ leaderships, the
more ideologically-minded of which explicitly re-branded themselves from the
1950s as cross-class ‘people’s parties’. The continuous pursuit of the logic of
seeking compromise between classes that were never equally balanced in power
and influence did much to bring about the unravelling of the social-democratic
project and hence the disorientation that exists today. Yet this choice was not
inevitable: even if the ‘traditional’ proletariat of manual workers in
manufacturing and extractive industries ceased expanding, capitalism generated
new layers of white-collar proletarians and semi-proletarians, who were equally
subject to exploitation, alienation and insecurity. They lacked, however, the
same degree of class-consciousness (although this began to change from the late
1960s, with the growth of white-collar unions) and they certainly lacked any
automatic political affiliation with socialism. The challenge for the left was
to integrate them into a wider and deeper-rooted labour movement, but by this
stage the social democrats were more interested in playing the parliamentary
game than in building a force capable of revolutionising society.
Today, the rule of neo-liberal capitalism has fragmented and
disorientated the working class still further and the task of rebuilding a
class-conscious workers’ movement is that much harder. The severity of the
attacks on the jobs and rights of working people, and on the services they use
and provide, is such that the need for a socialist alternative should be
comprehensible to all. But to rebuild the movement, we have to start with the
bricks that come to hand; political organisation cannot run too far ahead of
the consciousness of working people. To re-connect the principles of class
politics with people’s concrete experiences, we need to make a concerted effort
to revive and popularise socialist ideas. The task is likely to be long and
drawn-out but the supposed alternative, of seeking short cuts by declaring new
parties when the resources to sustain them do not exist, is no alternative at
all.
NOTES
1. I have addressed the continued relevance of class politics in more
general terms in a previous article: ‘Class Structure and Class Politics’, in Workers Action 27 (Oct/Nov 2004),
pp.30-37.
2. Even in Cuba, which has
achieved sustained progress towards socialism, the seizure of power by the
working class and peasantry was not accomplished under the leadership of the
principal established workers’ party, the PSP, but by the 26th of July Movement
(M-26-7), a radical nationalist organisation supported by a broad coalition of
social forces. Today’s Cuban Communist Party was created through the merger of
the PSP with the M-26-7.
3. Of these countries, the United States is, of course, exceptional in
not having a mass workers’ party at all; nevertheless, working class political
organisation has as long a history there as in any other advanced capitalist
country – longer, in fact, as the world’s first labour party was established by
Philadelphia artisans in 1828 (a fact cited by Marx and recalled by Mike Davis
in ‘Why the US Working Class is Different’, New
Left Review 123 [Sept-Oct 1980]).
4. G. Elliott, Labourism and the English Genius: The
Strange Death of Labour England? (London: Verso, 1993), chapter 1.
5.
Both Lenin, in works such as ‘Left-wing’ Communism: an Infantile Disorder,
and later Trotsky argued that it was necessary for communists to participate
in the British Labour Party and
support the election of Labour candidates, while voicing their
criticisms of the party’s policies. In so doing, the communists could demonstrate
their commitment to the interests of the class before Labour’s constituency of
class-conscious workers; the inevitable vindication of their criticisms
would help to build support for revolutionary socialism. It should be
acknowledged that Lenin and Trotsky underestimated
the firmness of the hold that would be exerted by social democracy
over the majority of politically-conscious workers – strengthened, of course,
by the real social gains they would deliver in the period of postwar
welfare capitalism.
6. Figures for the USA are given on the same basis as for other
countries (i.e., percentage of registered voters) but the low level of voter
registration in that country means that percentage of voting age population is
a more meaningful indicator of political participation – and this has frequently
been lower than 50 per cent.
7. The only Labour measures
that met with any resistance from the bourgeoisie were the nationalisation of
iron and steel and of road haulage (both re-privatised by the Tories) and its
unfulfilled plans to nationalise sugar. There were specific factors in France
and Austria: respectively, the punishment of collaborators and the need to
prevent German-owned concerns being expropriated by the Soviet Union, by way of
reparations; but then, it is unlikely that Labour would have carried out so
much nationalisation other than in the immediate post-war context. See D.
Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism:
The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (London: Fontana, 1997),
pp.150-66.
8. See the article, ‘Taxing the Rich, 1957-Style’ on the US website, Too Much: a Commentary on Excess and
Inequality (http://www.cipa-apex.org/toomuch/articlenew2006/Feb13a.html).
9. Conversely, while the mass Communist parties have
generally been workers’ parties in both senses (which is not to endorse their
various political strategies), the smaller left parties, while undoubtedly
committed to the workers’ cause, have rarely had much of a base within the
working class.
10. For a summary of the debate among Marxists on the boundaries of the
working class, see my article cited in note 1.
11. Labour’s two 1974 manifestoes contained the famous promise ‘to bring
about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power
in favour of working people and their families’. By 1992, Labour was simply
promising to ‘empower people as
citizens and as consumers of public and private services’. All of Labour’s
election manifestoes up to 2001 are available on the unofficial website, www.labour-party.org.uk.
12. On this, see S. Padgett & W.E. Paterson, A History of Social Democracy in Postwar Europe (London: Longman,
1991), chapters 1 & 2.
13. In fact, there seems to be little evidence that he ever used this
precise term, although it is broadly consistent with his stated views on the
subject.
14. One could argue that they ceased to be bourgeois workers’ parties
when they formally adopted socialist programmes after the First World War,
becoming pure workers’ parties
(albeit reformist ones) but then reverted to being bourgeois workers’ parties
again in the 1980s/90s when they decisively abandoned their previous socialist
aims.
15. This account draws on T. Abse, ‘Lessons to be learned from
Rifondazione’, Socialist Resistance
(winter 2002), p.20.
16. See P. Firmin, ‘New left party in Germany’, Labour Left Briefing (September 2005).
17. See http://www.communist-party.org.uk/downloads/LeftWingProgramme.pdf.
18. As Perry Anderson once pointed out: ‘The whole modus operandi of social democratic politics is geared to an
illusion: . . . . a monocentric democracy in which power is
co-extensive with the means of legislation . . . [and]
. . . is distributed symmetrically to every adult citizen at regular
intervals (elections) . . . then immediately reconstituted into a
new, unitary pattern (government).’ ‘Problems of Socialist Strategy’ in P.
Anderson & R. Blackburn (eds), Towards
Socialism (London: Fontana/NLR, 1965), p.235.
19. Ibid, p.256.
20. On this, see J. Wills and M. Simms, ‘Building Reciprocal Community
Unionism in the UK’, Capital & Class
82 (spring 2004), pp.59-84; and S. Gindin, ‘Notes on Labor at the End of the
Century: Starting Over?’ in E. Meiksins Wood et al (eds), Rising from the Ashes? Labor in the Age of ‘Global’ Capital (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), pp.190-202.
21. A. Giddens, The Third Way: The
Renewal of Social Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p.104.
22. Useful recent material on this subject includes the
pamphlet by B. Jackson & P. Segal, Why
Inequality Matters (London: Catalyst, 2004), available here: http://www.catalystforum.org.uk/pdf/inequality.pdf
and, in general, the content of the website Too
Much (http://www.cipa-apex.org/toomuch/).
23. Majority social-democratic governments were first
formed in Australia (1929-32) and New Zealand (1935-40), then in Sweden
(1945-48), Britain (1945-51) and Norway (1945-61). Other countries did not
follow suit until the 1970s (Austria) or 1980s (France, Greece, Spain).
24. A. Przeworski, Capitalism and
Social Democracy (CUP 1986).