The politics of the left in the UK

[Flosshilde]

the Northern cities whose government support was drastically cut in Militant's day, and is being even m ore drastically cut again now.

BY Thatcher removing the local government tax base & putting a cap on poll tax/council tax, so that even if the population voted for a council that promised higher tax, they were blocked. Derek Hatton's council were resisiting that & trying to exercise local democracy.

[jean]

BY Thatcher removing the local government tax base & putting a cap on poll tax/council tax, so that even if the population voted for a council that promised higher tax, they were blocked. Derek Hatton's council were resisiting that & trying to exercise local democracy.

Yes, I know that.

And we're in the same position now, or worse, as I said. And the same solutions are being offered, here, now, though there's little enthusiasm for them.

But it's the local democracy bit I'm interested in. Hatton & co. had a very narrow concept of what the workers needed - and it didn't include, for example, a symphony orchestra. Or any museums and galleries. Or any historic public buildings.

Did they ask local people about withdrawing support from these important ingredients of civic life? I don't think so - they just made the assumption that they were elitist, irrelevant to the working class, and they could go.

[ahinton]

If I voted for nice Mr Cameron.

Two issues here; firstly, how "nice" do most people really think that Mr Cameron is and, secondly, none of them would vote for him in any case whatever they might rightly or wrongly think of him unless they happened to be in the Witney constituency.

[ahinton]

Yes, I know that.

And we're in the same position now, or worse, as I said. And the same solutions are being offered, here, now, though there's little enthusiasm for them.

But it's the local democracy bit I'm interested in. Hatton & co. had a very narrow concept of what the workers needed - and it didn't include, for example, a symphony orchestra. Or any museums and galleries. Or any historic public buildings.

Did they ask local people about withdrawing support from these important ingredients of civic life? I don't think so - they just made the assumption that they were elitist, irrelevant to the working class, and they could go.

Good pointgs - but don't you also suspect that this misperception of élitism is in part a symptom of the pursuit of the notion of "the working classes" (as the term is generally understood) rather than simply accepting that workers of all kinds work, at all levels from senior management to tea-makers? "Working class" has long seemed to carry with it a whiff of low-paid, blue-collar, oppressed people who all vote Labour and are unionised, whereas it ought in reality to cover everyone who works, whether in the public sector, as an employee in the private sector or in his/her own business; whilst I do not necessarily believe that the term was invented for the purpose of promoting divisiveness, that's what it has in fact done, just as has been the case with "upper class", "middle class" and all the others in between and it's long struck me as a cynical attempt to put people into convenient pigeon holes of their own making and "classify" them thereby. Even Marx supposedly believed in the individual!

[jean]

Marx also believed on the value of 'high' culture. By the time we got to Militant in the 1970s, our very own Cultural Revolution had set in.

(My flirtation with the 'far' left ended when I was told once too often that I'd betrayed my working class origins by going to university.)

[Flosshilde]

But don't you think, Jean, that you might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater - that, because (in your view) Derek Hatton, who represented a particular form of socialism, was 'bad' for Liverpool (ie a specific place with specific conditions), then all forms of socialism are 'bad' for everybody?

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

well the demos and walkouts by council workers in Liverpool blocked the traffic and did nowt for any one as far as could be told by a guest worker such as myself....

Militant did nothing, nor Livingstone, comparable to the achievements of the London County Council under Morrison and after ... and all failed the ambition of the Atlee Government to remake a post war people's nation

nowadays with arguably the worst inequality in this land since William The Conqueror and the Great Vampire Squid Herd's tentacles dug deeper than ever into the fabrics of our societies we should perhaps look at the left of the 30s and 40s and beware the apparent 'liberal' mind sets that range the gamut of ideas from A-B ...

linear dichotomies do not help any more imho; we must confront gangsterism on unprecedented scales ... even voting is now of dubious benefit; not voting noisily might be much more potent in our present circumstance...

[jean]

well the demos and walkouts by council workers in Liverpool blocked the traffic and did nowt for any one as far as could be told by a guest worker such as myself...

The supporters of Militant would presumably argue that the demos and walkouts by council workers were an unintended consequence of Central Government's failure to recognise when it had been beaten by the collective will of the People of Liverpool...

.

[jean]

But don't you think, Jean, that you might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater...

Maybe. But life without an orchestra is not worth living. If I have to thank David Mellor for the orchestra's survival, then I hold my nose and thank him.

I certainly don't reject socialism, though. I just want to be sure the particular version I pick will have orchestras.

As for not voting noisily, how noisy would you have to be before anyone heard?

Why not just bypass the voting/not voting bit and have a revolution?

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

not from the cussing from bystanders i heard!

revolutions don't work; eventually a movement has to crystalise and gain legitimate power; we have had enough thievery of power already [i am not holding my breath]

[jean]

The bystanders were clearly afflicted with false consciousness.

Revolutions have a way of getting out of hand, don't they? Or even back into the hands you'd hoped to be liberated from. Plenty of examples of that recently.

So what's the alternative to voting? Or at least working towards a political movement people might vote for?

Why has the Left such a dismal record in providing a credible socialist alternative?

.

[Serial_Apologist]

Militant did nothing, nor Livingstone, comparable to the achievements of the London County Council under Morrison and after ... and all failed the ambition of the Atlee Government to remake a post war people's nation

I don't agree with that at all as regards Ken, who approached introducing socialist policies through the GLC through bottom-up democratic involvement, encouraging (rather than imposing) among other initiatives tenants association involvement and inputs into the design or improvement and running of council estates - very different from the Fabian, paternalistic, top-down sub-Stalinist approaches propounded by Ambercrombie & co during and after WW2, as well as promulgating a qualitiative increase in womens' and ethnic movement input. It was a renewal of the socialist foundling's priniples of what constituted social;ism - in Tony Benn's words, you couldn't have true socialism without democracy, nor true democracy without socialism - and it was because it was starting to work that Thatcher had to ban the GLC.

The kind of socialism advocated by socialists involves more than voting once every 4 or 5 years. The problem with post-WW2 Labour reformism was apathy resulting from everything being left to experts often (if not always) placed above the populace as a whole who had little or no say. The working class were seldom self-organised outside the limited spheres of working men's clubs (sic) and trade unions except during industrial disputes when activists urged workforces to be on the lookout and organised against manoeuvres by the employer class (capitalists, ahinton), trade union bureaucrats more interested in maintaining their own power and privileges, propaganda by the capitalist-owned media and a compliant BBC, restrictional uses of the law and force by the state. The original idea of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat propounded by Lenin and much misunderstood, was for the working class, self-organised across and between its communities and workplaces to sweep away the ruling class and take on the running of industry and society in a democratically bottom-up way.

[french frank]

because (in your view) Derek Hatton, who represented a particular form of socialism, was 'bad' for Liverpool (ie a specific place with specific conditions), then all forms of socialism are 'bad' for everybody?

How many forms of socialism are there? Or should one just accept that it contains a spectrum of views and the way in which it is brought into effect makes the difference. If there is such a thing as a 'far' left version (to quote Jean) then there might be quite a few who would see it as 'bad' for everybody.

At any rate, it was Militant (the 'party within a party') and the Foot/Benn version of socialism which effectively split the Labour Party, and (in their estimation) made it impossible for the 'Gang of Four' to stay and fight their corner - especially over Europe.

If socialism is to thrive it surely has to do so with the acceptance and support of the constituency which it aims to represent? I tend to feel that "Red Ken" had a lighter touch which did have popular appeal (though demonised by the right), whereas Militant went to the extreme where it became autocratic and authoritarian. Does my memory let me down? - the details have become rather hazy to one who lived neither in Liverpool nor London at the time.

[Serial_Apologist]

The bystanders were clearly afflicted with false consciousness.

Revolutions have a way of getting out of hand, don't they? Or even back into the hands you'd hoped to be liberated from. Plenty of examples of that recently.

So what's the alternative to voting?

No alternative to voting for the time being - just go for the least worst alternative, I'd say. But I agree - even Lenin brought back former capitalists for their expertise under the New Economic Plan, and most of the original Bolsheviks were wiped out in Stalin's purges of the 30s. That individuals are qualitatively changed as damagingly as radicalised by philosophies assuming ends justifying whatever means used was completely overlooked, radicalisation lasting only as long as conditions favoured, bitterness the long-term inherntance. What's always depressing, having attended many of the Coalition Against the War demos, was the apparent failure among what remained of the left groups I remember from the 70s to learn any lessons from the left's failure! Same old same old we're the true inheritors of 1917 etc etc. The problem had consisted in the resurrection of vulgarised Marxist positions after the failings of May '68, unquestioned and unaffected by New Left thinking because judged academic. Big chances were missed in the early 1980s to apply what the New Left had taken on board from earlier thinkers such as Benjamin, Gramsci, Fromm and Marcuse - structural changes in the state rendering calls for its smashing absurd, the rise of ecological wisdom and a Green movement, anti-commercialist undergrounds siring co-ops among jazz, improv and rock musics, Perestroika, Liberation theology in latin America forcing the restart of some thinking in Christian circles, Mike Cooley's alternative plans to redundancies and closures at Lucas Aerospace, Meriden etc. Instead of which we had narrow, unenriched versions of "Marxism" hyperactively propelled into communities wed to unsustainable material self-betterment unknown in Marx and Engels' time by tiny grouplets, each with its own version of the Truth, treating socialism as a religious faith. Just like one sees in the radical young Muslims leafleting the streets today!

[Serial_Apologist]

How many forms of socialism are there? Or should one just accept that it contains a spectrum of views and the way in which it is brought into effect makes the difference. If there is such a thing as a 'far' left version (to quote Jean) then there might be quite a few who would see it as 'bad' for everybody.

At any rate, it was Militant (the 'party within a party') and the Foot/Benn version of socialism which effectively split the Labour Party, and (in their estimation) made it impossible for the 'Gang of Four' to stay and fight their corner - especially over Europe.

If socialism is to thrive it surely has to do so with the acceptance and support of the constituency which it aims to represent? I tend to feel that "Red Ken" had a lighter touch which did have popular appeal (though demonised by the right), whereas Militant went to the extreme where it became autocratic and authoritarian. Does my memory let me down? - the details have become rather hazy to one who lived neither in Liverpool nor London at the time.

The socialism that attracted anti-authoritarians such as me was effectively summed up in Clause 4 of the Labour Party Constitution, ff.

The Gang of Four didn't stay though, did they!

Militant were bullies. Lack of psychological insight has been another failing on the left - the dictatorial Stalin under their noses that Trotsky and Lenin failed to notice in the very act of changing Russian society. Anyone who watched "Our Friends in the North" would have seen the dynamics of the Labour Party unfolded over an historical period and the machinations of Militant explained.