The politics of the left in the UK

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

a useful and interesting contribution to thinking through the new agenda of the left

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

and a call to join the Left

alas with a name like that they are dead in the water with their heads firmly in the past ... not just Labour , the Left is the problem .... time for new thinking and new names seems to me ...

[jean]

Not another new socialist grouping!

I don't see any names at all, new or old, on their website. I see they've given us Greens a third of their triangular logo - but if they take votes from us in the NW Euroelections and allow Nick Griffin in again by a whisker, we will never forgive them. The Merseyactivist list has been remarkably silent about them although their conference is in Manchester.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

and then there is Mr McCluskey

i find increasing incredulity amongst the elites of the giant squid formations that we , and more especially the young, are not in possession of the streets and banging seven bells out of bankers, in the like of Diane Coyle's blog ... and i find myself increasingly inconsistent in rejecting the antics of the left in the 70s and 80s while arguing for a noisome non-voting rebelliousness and opposition now ... and finding the prospect of mass civic disobedience so attractive as an option to confront the squid and its acolytes in all their manifestations ...

Wall Street cohorts see money everywhere. They will attempt to squeeze a deal even if it’s not a banking project. Like street thugs, Wall Street banks are manipulating prices, such as aluminum, to profit.

and one might add, London The City, Frankfurt, Tokyo and the other nests of the financial power elite gangsters and their kith and kin in governments [eh George 'n Dave?]

has there been a time when such massive corruption and misuse of power for the plutocrats been so known and yet so inertly responded to? what is afoot?

[aeolium]

has there been a time when such massive corruption and misuse of power for the plutocrats been so known and yet so inertly responded to? what is afoot?

There is of course the omnipresent threat of physical force and severe penal sanctions to back up and enforce the policies of the establishment, as seen with the London riots (someone jailed for stealing a teeshirt while bankers who have effectively stolen billions go free) and the protests in Greece. There is also the effective support, or at best lukewarm criticism, of most of the mainstream media much of which is owned by plutocrats. Even the BBC tends to favour the government of the day in effectively engaging the debate on the government's terms (talking up the recovery while minimising proper discussion of the severe effect of benefits changes on the poor, the widespread inequality, or the failure to enforce adequate banking regulation).

I can't muster up any enthusiasm for the proposed new leftist parties, which simply seem to hark back to ideas from a much earlier age without seeking to address the reality that confronts us now. Of the existing parties, the Greens seem to me to have the best policies, though I'd like to see more detail as to how they would seek to reform the EU which desperately needs it. But more likely than any resurgence of the left is an upsurge of support for the reactionary right throughout Europe, which I think will be seen in the European election results.

[Serial_Apologist]

I shall probably vote Green again in the General Election, and then if McCluskey manages to head up a new reformist party to the left of the LP, following electoral defeat, judge on its validity and viability from its programme and who is included, in support, and funding. From memory (probably faulty), the last time something of this kind (Left Unity) was formed, it was for passing electoral purposes, and the Greens were either excluded from its electoral coalition or excluded themselves - something along the lines of not going along with a programme of wholesale nationalisation. We can talk through the semantics of Popular Front, Broad Democratic Alliance, United Front etc, but exclusion or self-exclusion of the Greens would be a disaster imv.

[aeolium]

Here is another piece bemoaning the seemingly retrograde visions of many on the left, and I tend to agree with much of what Harris says, that the left cannot go on fighting the battles of one or two generations ago.

This, I thought, was an interesting and moving piece (and I recommend people to listen to the documentary) about regimes that were not uncommon in Eastern Europe as recently as a generation ago, and which were for a long time defended by some of those on the left:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26838177

Even if these regimes were a travesty of socialism, their claim to be socialist has lastingly tarnished the idea of socialism, and they ought to stand as a permanent warning to those who long for powerful centralised states - of whatever ideology.

[Serial_Apologist]

Here is another piece bemoaning the seemingly retrograde visions of many on the left, and I tend to agree with much of what Harris says, that the left cannot go on fighting the battles of one or two generations ago.

I still go by what Tony Benn said, "You can't control what you don't own"; I think it's as true as ever. Harris nevertheless raises one or two interesting questions in relation to the hows of alternative social control: state ownership or mutuals, to instance two possible forms.

This, I thought, was an interesting and moving piece (and I recommend people to listen to the documentary) about regimes that were not uncommon in Eastern Europe as recently as a generation ago, and which were for a long time defended by some of those on the left:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26838177

Even if these regimes were a travesty of socialism, their claim to be socialist has lastingly tarnished the idea of socialism, and they ought to stand as a permanent warning to those who long for powerful centralised states - of whatever ideology.

Yes but you're talking about stalinism here, not socialism, and I don't know of anybody in the West, except possibly the New Communist Party, a pro-Moscow split from the CPGB, that thought that way by the late-1970s. We didn't get active in the 1960s and 70s with the aim of creating a society like the Soviet Union, you know!!! Probably an equivalent in terms of tarninshing a good and useful name was the Fabian, top-down version of socialism brought in by the Atlee government with the agreement of the trade union bureaucracy after WWII - one of social ownership in name only, not control, and managed by ex-union bureaucrats and ex-capitalists and paid commensurate with the ceo levels of private industry that perpetuated, rather than undermined, the class society.

[jean]

Wasn't it Harris I saw on Newsnight yesterday, fervently agreeing with some UKIP woman about immigration?

[aeolium]

Wasn't it Harris I saw on Newsnight yesterday, fervently agreeing with some UKIP woman about immigration?

No idea - I never watch it these days.

[aeolium]

Yes but you're talking about stalinism here, not socialism, and I don't know of anybody in the West, except possibly the New Communist Party, a pro-Moscow split from the CPGB, that thought that way by the late-1970s.

I think there were still quite a few from various walks of life, mostly those influenced by their pre-war experiences and attitudes towards the fight against fascism and laissez-faire capitalism. I'm thinking of people like Eric Hobsbawm, Mick McGahey, the Cambridge spies. And perhaps a larger group of those who did not think that the principles of communism were invalidated by its flawed implementation in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. But I think the experience of communism in those regions has had a baleful influence elsewhere in that it has inhibited the left in coming up with a radical philosophy to address the manifest failures of monetarist capitalism - it is a spectre haunting Europe (and elsewhere) indeed. And that is why it is that the disaffected are more likely to turn to the nationalist right to attack the establishment than the left.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

the Cold War was a war .... the images from Budapest were telling and the Left did not deal with it at all convincingly; and even less so Mao's Little Book and big pogroms in the Cultural Revolution ... very fashionable for a while - even now denial of the slaughter involved remains scandalous ....

the dichotomy of with/against free world/communist world [no space to be opposed to both USSR/PRC and USA ] ... it would be amusing if it were not so drear and indeed tragic to watch the current leaders giving the Muppets a bad name as they toil to keep alive the dead and irrelevant parties and ideologies of the 70s & 80s

it is tragic that the call for school for two year olds is now made; some decades ago the atomisation of our social milieus by Thatcherism [no such thing &c] in politics and the Giant Vampire Squid in economics have conspired to destroy the communities that nurtured parenting competence and support of families by extended families ... now we can afford to travel between the houses we can nt afford to live in .... it takes a sight more than a village, as Mrs Clinton has it, to raise a child and alas its been flogged off .... isolated and poorly educated parents with little or no community support raise kids who are incompetent for nursery schools ...

we enter a social world as deprived as the 1920s and 30s; the experience of the slump and the society of those years led to the victory of Labour in 45 ... in our world the gangsters of finance and corporate elites seek the control of government to maintain the extraction of wealth on scales beyond the criminal ... but to talk of this will scare the punters?

the power elites of the pre war years were the blimps of imperial Britain; now they are global cosmopolitan cocoon inhabitants and much nastier ...

[Serial_Apologist]

the Cold War was a war .... the images from Budapest were telling and the Left did not deal with it at all convincingly; and even less so Mao's Little Book and big pogroms in the Cultural Revolution ... very fashionable for a while - even now denial of the slaughter involved remains scandalous ....

Phew! Rhetoric always wins out with one-liners queuing for clarification-demanding refutation when their aftertaste seems to call for responses in kind!

the dichotomy of with/against free world/communist world [no space to be opposed to both USSR/PRC and USA ] ... it would be amusing if it were not so drear and indeed tragic to watch the current leaders giving the Muppets a bad name as they toil to keep alive the dead and irrelevant parties and ideologies of the 70s & 80s

Well there was the International Socialists/Socialist Workers' Party (still extant) who saw not just the USSR but Cuba, China, Yugoslavia, Albania, the entire E Bloc, N Korea, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam post 1975 as State Capitalist, iow a new form of capitalism, rather like many of those who've given up on Marxism see Neo-Liberalism as a new form of capitalism. They thought it ironic when people came up to their newspaper vendors telling them to "Go back to Russia"! And of course the poor old Maoists ended up with only Albania providing their model for human salvation - after which (or even before!) one easily lost track of them. Really, Calum, the influence, if one could so brand it, of the Cultural Revolution on any part of the left, nationally or internationally, was very limited in numbers and for a short period of time. Which is not to say there weren't quasi-religious sects proclaiming, for instance, the first Peoples Soviet in Brixton, or intergalactic socialism, the latter on the grounds that only post-capitalist systems could devise technology sufficiently advanced to facilitate it!

it is tragic that the call for school for two year olds is now made; some decades ago the atomisation of our social milieus by Thatcherism [no such thing &c] in politics and the Giant Vampire Squid in economics have conspired to destroy the communities that nurtured parenting competence and support of families by extended families ... now we can afford to travel between the houses we can nt afford to live in .... it takes a sight more than a village, as Mrs Clinton has it, to raise a child and alas its been flogged off .... isolated and poorly educated parents with little or no community support raise kids who are incompetent for nursery schools ...

we enter a social world as deprived as the 1920s and 30s; the experience of the slump and the society of those years led to the victory of Labour in 45 ... in our world the gangsters of finance and corporate elites seek the control of government to maintain the extraction of wealth on scales beyond the criminal ... but to talk of this will scare the punters?

the power elites of the pre war years were the blimps of imperial Britain; now they are global cosmopolitan cocoon inhabitants and much nastier ...

Now you're talking! Much of what you choose to decry can be answered at greater length: but in short the problem was less dead and irrelevant parties and ideologies of the 70s and 80s than unjoined up thinking and therefore misdirected action at the time. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, especially now that it has lost its material base for action, or hasn't yet found its replacement.

[Serial_Apologist]

I think there were still quite a few from various walks of life, mostly those influenced by their pre-war experiences and attitudes towards the fight against fascism and laissez-faire capitalism. I'm thinking of people like Eric Hobsbawm, Mick McGahey, the Cambridge spies. And perhaps a larger group of those who did not think that the principles of communism were invalidated by its flawed implementation in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

You make a very strong point in that last sentance. As an only partly self-reconstructed Trotskyist I still make no bones about feeling for the people of Russia and the E Bloc satellites who in effect suffered for the cause of preventing capitalism's spread. Much of the disillusionment that has disarmed the brief post-Gorbachev era left from formulating ideas and policies with which to challenge the hegemony of Neo-Liberalism flows I think from the following:

1) An historic failure to foresee other than positive outcomes from the consequence of holding to a purely insurrectionary model of social change, summed up in Trotsky's ultimatistic "socialism or barbarism";

2) A qualitative change whereby Marxism changed from an emergent social science and guide for political action into a religion preaching the "inevitability" of socialism;

3) An at-best ambivalence towards the roles of art and psychology, post-Lenin, owing to false or simplistic associations with "bourgeois culture";

4) An underestimation of the hold of institutions deemed ready for demolition in the popular consciousness, based on the pre-welfare state;

5) Over-dependence on methods of class struggle which inconvenience all but the rich, such as strikes, in which immediate objectives thereby lose sight of (or never bring into sight) the so-say tacit longterm objectives, when alternatives such as work-to-rules and workers' plans pose practicability and who decides above and against business-determined "choice".

6) The marginalisation of ecology and environment, owing more to Judaeo-Christian-derived notions of "conquering nature" than Marx's theory of value residing in tranforming materials initially hewn from a self-balancing/sustaining natural order and socially agreed exchange.

For what my own view's worth I would place great "spiritual" weight on Point 5), as do the Greens.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

this looks to be a must read book

what i posted above about the left, cold war &c is pretty much what i thought at the time ... most certainly not 'hindsight' rather recollection of antipathy on my part; the SWP were like the rest of the left in that period possessed of some intellectual coherence but no social organisation or political potency, and were as capable of collectivist denial and nonsense as the rest of the fringe left ... the people from the left that i encountered in my years as an active TU member were on the whole nasty types, doctrinaire and hostile with the arrogance that others were deserving of their hostility ... they were just out of power psychopathic and immature control freaks ...


the task for the Left is far more serious than any of the fantasies of the groupings active in the UK in the second part of the 20th C. the article on Picketty's book highlights some possibilities ...