The arguments last Sunday morning on Not the Andrew Marr Show’s Chat about George Galloway and Jeremy Corbyn and other personalities of the British Left as figureheads for a new Left Party betray an uncomfortable truth about the British Left - our short-term thinking, both in regard to general political issues, and particularly when it comes to the cyclical topic about starting a new political organisation that can really make a difference.
Calls for a new Left Party usually come after the experience of defeat: this felt need for a new mass organisation nearly always follows the disarray, division and electoral failure in General Elections, which has been the Left’s experience ever since the Communist Party got members elected 75 or so years ago.
It also occurs when missed political opportunities such as the General Election just held are felt to be due to the absence of a united Left organisation or electoral coalition with some kind of history behind it which has gathered a support base; the yearning to be bigger than the sum of our parts involves green-eyed jealousy of the French Left Coalition that has just made us look like pathetic amateurs.
Our short-term thinking means we almost always opt for top-down party-building:
a) persuade a Left-wing personality to call for or front a new party and then get behind that. It never works and it is anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic and anti-socialist. Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, Ted Grant’s WRP, Tony Cliff’s SWP, and Ken Loach’s Left Unity have been followed by a double dose of George Galloway-led organisations: Respect and, now, the Worker’s Party of Great Britain.
The underlying problem of short-term thinking also manifests in
b) trying to turn a mass movement around a single issue into a mass party of the Left. This seems to apply to all of the afore-mentioned organisations, and typically ignores or postpones dealing with the contradictions between socialists and single issue campaigners; Craig Murray tried unsuccessfully to begin a discussion on that in last Sunday's Not the Andrew Marr Show, in relation to British Muslims, the General Election campaigns and the Workers’ Party.
Like it’s predecessors, the Workers’ Party is a product of both of these weaknesses in what passes for the British Left’s thinking on party building; an analysis of its' electoral performance just now shows this contradiction graphically - apart from seats in which a Muslim candidate stood for the WP where there was significant Muslim community angered by the Palestinian genocide, its' candidates scraped only marginally above the usual 1 - 2% of the vote we have come to be so very ashamed of in elections past.
The only way forward in building a Left Wing political party which can actually impact political discussion and action within the broad labour movement and wider society is the hard and lengthy process of building a mass organisation from below, engaging with people we don’t normally engage with, to build something which comprehensively reflects the breadth of concerns, problems and issues that people raise and experience and which stays accountable to it’s membership in it’s internal democratic structures, it’s internal and external behaviour, it’s core values and it’s political programmes and campaigning. In short - movement first, Party second; the Left Party comes out of working with people to fightback on many fronts.
Instead, what we invariably get is a hasty construction of something focused on a prominent figure of the Left, fighting the issues of the present and immediate future after scantily reviewing it’s ‘’lessons’ from the immediate past, with a majority of people on the Left opting to stand outside it, because their 57 varieties of political differences and priorities with each other feel more important than having a genuine, united impact; most people on the Left go back to their blogs and tiny grouplets of adherents of specific ways of interpreting politics, and so politics continues to be something which happens to us, not what we make happen.
I am wearily depressed at seeing this farcical, repetitive historical failure of my generation of the British Left played out before my eyes for the nth time; this will not be the first time that I have felt so disillusioned because I see no real prospect of the Left influencing the working class, let alone engaging with the class or learning from it.
What irks me in particular is that the real need and opportunity is staring us in the face: we will, perhaps, never again have such a plethora of indisputable facts and statistics setting out the undemocratic, iniquitous and untrusted UK electoral system, alongside such clear evidence that people generally feel their vote does not count under this farce that the political class refer to as 'democracy'
Unlike the Palestinian genocide & the PSC, unlike the war on Iraq and STW, and unlike the neoliberal de-industrialisation following the defeat of the Miners and the Scargill SLP, the gaping democratic deficit evident so graphically this week is a GENERAL, POLITICAL issue and therefore presents the Left with the very real opportunity of building a significant, mass movement to replace First Pass the Post.
In the nature of mass movements and the activism and dialogue they involve, other dimensions of the democratic deficit, such as the array of unaccountable and discretionary Crown Prerogative powers vested in Ministers of State, the lack of any kind of public say in choosing the Prime Minister, the unelected House of Lords and senior Civil Servants will no doubt emerge, deepening and sharpening a growing consensus that we need a radical overhaul of what passes for the UK constitution before we can start to deal with the causes of the material problems all around us.
An uncontextualised call for a new party of the Left based on the same old, failed, top-down, format of 'popular' leader, like Moses or Mohammed in the desert, is not a serious way forward for the Left and never was - it defies the actualhistory of how the big Left political parties of the past, like the Bolsheviks, the Peoples' Revolutionary Army and so on, were built and sustained.
But above all, it is not called for by the post-General Election conjuncture, and not by the nature of the era we find ourselves in - the post-financial crisis of 2007-8 in which global neoliberalism hit the wall and has stuttered ever since, incapable of finding the basis for another capitalist production cycle. The major, and international, feature of this era is the crisis of democracy; its' degeneration and palpable inability to be a credible alternative, in the face of growing authoritarianism. This exposes the body of lies on which its' familiar narrative is and has always been based.
This broader political crisis, so graphically illustrated by the unavoidable analysis of the General Election results, call for the Left to rise to the longer-term and vital challenge of taking up the cause of real democracy and initiating a mass movement, in the first instance to replace FPTP.
But can a British Left which has, for so long, been wedded to an economism, to an overriding concern with industrial militancy, to an unerring focus on material inequalities and a near total blindness to political structures and political power, rise to this challenge?
I am not encouraged by post-election discussion I have been part of or read that it can. Passing references to the disproportionality between votes cast and political power outcomes feels like the airy musings of psephologist undergraduates in a seminar rather than the realisation that to pass up the political opportunity presented by this one-off opportunity to enter the political arena in a significant way would be to admit to having lost any aspiration to playng a political role in history!
Lots of comments here I agree with John. I can assure you that I agree this an excellent moment TO BUILD OPPOSITION...and indeed that is one of the main reasons I created THE LEFT LANE.
Thanks for that contribution. I agree with much of what you say but just wanted to make clear that in my piece I was not implicitly calling for the formation of a new left party - at least not any time soon - for the kind of reasons you cite. However, in the longer term and no matter the problems experienced by the SSP and PBP (in the North and South of Ireland) over declared and undeclared factional splits as well as working with other parts of the radical left, it seems to me there is something useful to be learnt from their experience of gaining local council representation which can then facilitate the election of higher level public representatives. Such representatives are needed to help build wider social forces because they provide a useful public platform and some credibility. Of course the nature of the electoral system has a bearing upon this as do the state of the social movements. If we are to get anywhere in the next few years, some kind of broadly united left party which is able to draw in new people as activists seems the most effective way forward - certainly more so that the self-declared vanguard parties. Gregor
BTW Ted Grant was Militant - it was Gerry Healy with the WRP
You are a bad man, Gregor, for reminding me of Gerry Healy, whom I had long since consigned to 'nightmares not to be revisited. One day, I might find it in my heart to forgive you.
So what are the thoughts on Schneider’s our bloc: How we win? The argument seems to be for a federated organisation that unites democratic socialists from inside and outside of existing parties. I guess this could focus on a single bundle of policies (Schneider suggests green new deal; I guess decentralisation and powers of local govt could be an alternative), connected to forums or local campaigns in the ground? I see some sense in it compared to a new “left party”, partly for the reasons John sets out above. … I am also concerned that here (Scotland) there will be a push to create another pro-independence left alliance in lead up to Scottish elections, on the back of SNP performance. Not necessarily a bad thing, but there is a tendency to then create a division between the Scottish left and the uk left as if there is nothing in common. A federated “bloc” could I suppose operate across the border without stopping a pro- independence section from taking a run at Holyrood. Any thoughts?
Thanks Jeff. Could you send an email to: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com ++++ Trying to buy this book. A temporary snafu (I am sure) preventing purchase,
This was very illuminating, from a US left perspective.
I still think, both in the UK and the US, new left parties are direly needed; certainly there are complications, but the need outweighs those. The leading problem, as I see it, is "affinity"; not enough left-wing people and factions have bonds above and outside of politics to make the affinities that make coalescing into larger bodies easier.
We have been goaded into self-atomizing too long and too thoroughly and have lost the basic political habits of meeting each other and cooperating. But at all costs and all hazards, that needs taken up again; the sooner the better.
This was very illuminating, from a US left perspective.
I still think, both in the UK and the US, new left parties are direly needed; certainly there are complications, but the need outweighs those. The leading problem, as I see it, is "affinity"; not enough left-wing people and factions have bonds above and outside of politics to make the affinities that make coalescing into larger bodies easier.
We have been goaded into self-atomizing too long and too thoroughly and have lost the basic political habits of meeting each other and cooperating. But at all costs and all hazards, that needs taken up again; the sooner the better.
This was very illuminating, from a US left perspective.
I still think, both in the UK and the US, new left parties are direly needed; certainly there are complications, but the need outweighs those. The leading problem, as I see it, is "affinity"; not enough left-wing people and factions have bonds above and outside of politics to make the affinities that make coalescing into larger bodies easier.
We have been goaded into self-atomizing too long and too thoroughly and have lost the basic political habits of meeting each other and cooperating. But at all costs and all hazards, that needs taken up again; the sooner the better.
"‘To put it another way, thanks to the second lowest turnout since 1885, scarcely 20 percent of eligible British voters support Keir Starmer’s Labour. Yet, he will end up with approximately two-thirds of all parliamentary seats.’"
Media Lens - 'Straight As A Die' - Giving Starmer A Free Pass
Can you please help in the distribution of todav's TLL by sharing this tweet?
https://x.com/LeftLane2024/status/1810706640460517574
Another huge problem. People do not understand the Labour Party and why it CANNOT be changed. I tried to address some of that issue here: https://theleftlane2024.substack.com/p/question-so-what-are-keir-starmers
https://www.medialens.org/2024/straight-as-a-die-giving-starmer-a-free-pass/ From MEDIA LENS
The arguments last Sunday morning on Not the Andrew Marr Show’s Chat about George Galloway and Jeremy Corbyn and other personalities of the British Left as figureheads for a new Left Party betray an uncomfortable truth about the British Left - our short-term thinking, both in regard to general political issues, and particularly when it comes to the cyclical topic about starting a new political organisation that can really make a difference.
Calls for a new Left Party usually come after the experience of defeat: this felt need for a new mass organisation nearly always follows the disarray, division and electoral failure in General Elections, which has been the Left’s experience ever since the Communist Party got members elected 75 or so years ago.
It also occurs when missed political opportunities such as the General Election just held are felt to be due to the absence of a united Left organisation or electoral coalition with some kind of history behind it which has gathered a support base; the yearning to be bigger than the sum of our parts involves green-eyed jealousy of the French Left Coalition that has just made us look like pathetic amateurs.
Our short-term thinking means we almost always opt for top-down party-building:
a) persuade a Left-wing personality to call for or front a new party and then get behind that. It never works and it is anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic and anti-socialist. Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, Ted Grant’s WRP, Tony Cliff’s SWP, and Ken Loach’s Left Unity have been followed by a double dose of George Galloway-led organisations: Respect and, now, the Worker’s Party of Great Britain.
The underlying problem of short-term thinking also manifests in
b) trying to turn a mass movement around a single issue into a mass party of the Left. This seems to apply to all of the afore-mentioned organisations, and typically ignores or postpones dealing with the contradictions between socialists and single issue campaigners; Craig Murray tried unsuccessfully to begin a discussion on that in last Sunday's Not the Andrew Marr Show, in relation to British Muslims, the General Election campaigns and the Workers’ Party.
Like it’s predecessors, the Workers’ Party is a product of both of these weaknesses in what passes for the British Left’s thinking on party building; an analysis of its' electoral performance just now shows this contradiction graphically - apart from seats in which a Muslim candidate stood for the WP where there was significant Muslim community angered by the Palestinian genocide, its' candidates scraped only marginally above the usual 1 - 2% of the vote we have come to be so very ashamed of in elections past.
The only way forward in building a Left Wing political party which can actually impact political discussion and action within the broad labour movement and wider society is the hard and lengthy process of building a mass organisation from below, engaging with people we don’t normally engage with, to build something which comprehensively reflects the breadth of concerns, problems and issues that people raise and experience and which stays accountable to it’s membership in it’s internal democratic structures, it’s internal and external behaviour, it’s core values and it’s political programmes and campaigning. In short - movement first, Party second; the Left Party comes out of working with people to fightback on many fronts.
Instead, what we invariably get is a hasty construction of something focused on a prominent figure of the Left, fighting the issues of the present and immediate future after scantily reviewing it’s ‘’lessons’ from the immediate past, with a majority of people on the Left opting to stand outside it, because their 57 varieties of political differences and priorities with each other feel more important than having a genuine, united impact; most people on the Left go back to their blogs and tiny grouplets of adherents of specific ways of interpreting politics, and so politics continues to be something which happens to us, not what we make happen.
I am wearily depressed at seeing this farcical, repetitive historical failure of my generation of the British Left played out before my eyes for the nth time; this will not be the first time that I have felt so disillusioned because I see no real prospect of the Left influencing the working class, let alone engaging with the class or learning from it.
What irks me in particular is that the real need and opportunity is staring us in the face: we will, perhaps, never again have such a plethora of indisputable facts and statistics setting out the undemocratic, iniquitous and untrusted UK electoral system, alongside such clear evidence that people generally feel their vote does not count under this farce that the political class refer to as 'democracy'
Unlike the Palestinian genocide & the PSC, unlike the war on Iraq and STW, and unlike the neoliberal de-industrialisation following the defeat of the Miners and the Scargill SLP, the gaping democratic deficit evident so graphically this week is a GENERAL, POLITICAL issue and therefore presents the Left with the very real opportunity of building a significant, mass movement to replace First Pass the Post.
In the nature of mass movements and the activism and dialogue they involve, other dimensions of the democratic deficit, such as the array of unaccountable and discretionary Crown Prerogative powers vested in Ministers of State, the lack of any kind of public say in choosing the Prime Minister, the unelected House of Lords and senior Civil Servants will no doubt emerge, deepening and sharpening a growing consensus that we need a radical overhaul of what passes for the UK constitution before we can start to deal with the causes of the material problems all around us.
An uncontextualised call for a new party of the Left based on the same old, failed, top-down, format of 'popular' leader, like Moses or Mohammed in the desert, is not a serious way forward for the Left and never was - it defies the actualhistory of how the big Left political parties of the past, like the Bolsheviks, the Peoples' Revolutionary Army and so on, were built and sustained.
But above all, it is not called for by the post-General Election conjuncture, and not by the nature of the era we find ourselves in - the post-financial crisis of 2007-8 in which global neoliberalism hit the wall and has stuttered ever since, incapable of finding the basis for another capitalist production cycle. The major, and international, feature of this era is the crisis of democracy; its' degeneration and palpable inability to be a credible alternative, in the face of growing authoritarianism. This exposes the body of lies on which its' familiar narrative is and has always been based.
This broader political crisis, so graphically illustrated by the unavoidable analysis of the General Election results, call for the Left to rise to the longer-term and vital challenge of taking up the cause of real democracy and initiating a mass movement, in the first instance to replace FPTP.
But can a British Left which has, for so long, been wedded to an economism, to an overriding concern with industrial militancy, to an unerring focus on material inequalities and a near total blindness to political structures and political power, rise to this challenge?
I am not encouraged by post-election discussion I have been part of or read that it can. Passing references to the disproportionality between votes cast and political power outcomes feels like the airy musings of psephologist undergraduates in a seminar rather than the realisation that to pass up the political opportunity presented by this one-off opportunity to enter the political arena in a significant way would be to admit to having lost any aspiration to playng a political role in history!
Lots of comments here I agree with John. I can assure you that I agree this an excellent moment TO BUILD OPPOSITION...and indeed that is one of the main reasons I created THE LEFT LANE.
I think John's comment here could be turned into a good article in itself.
I agree Phil. Will email him.
John
Thanks for that contribution. I agree with much of what you say but just wanted to make clear that in my piece I was not implicitly calling for the formation of a new left party - at least not any time soon - for the kind of reasons you cite. However, in the longer term and no matter the problems experienced by the SSP and PBP (in the North and South of Ireland) over declared and undeclared factional splits as well as working with other parts of the radical left, it seems to me there is something useful to be learnt from their experience of gaining local council representation which can then facilitate the election of higher level public representatives. Such representatives are needed to help build wider social forces because they provide a useful public platform and some credibility. Of course the nature of the electoral system has a bearing upon this as do the state of the social movements. If we are to get anywhere in the next few years, some kind of broadly united left party which is able to draw in new people as activists seems the most effective way forward - certainly more so that the self-declared vanguard parties. Gregor
BTW Ted Grant was Militant - it was Gerry Healy with the WRP
I agree 100% Gregor that it would be a huge mistake to prematurely create a new party. One key component is to learn the lessons of past attempts...and that is why your piece on the SSP is very useful: https://theleftlane2024.substack.com/p/socialism-in-scotland-lessons-from
You are a bad man, Gregor, for reminding me of Gerry Healy, whom I had long since consigned to 'nightmares not to be revisited. One day, I might find it in my heart to forgive you.
So what are the thoughts on Schneider’s our bloc: How we win? The argument seems to be for a federated organisation that unites democratic socialists from inside and outside of existing parties. I guess this could focus on a single bundle of policies (Schneider suggests green new deal; I guess decentralisation and powers of local govt could be an alternative), connected to forums or local campaigns in the ground? I see some sense in it compared to a new “left party”, partly for the reasons John sets out above. … I am also concerned that here (Scotland) there will be a push to create another pro-independence left alliance in lead up to Scottish elections, on the back of SNP performance. Not necessarily a bad thing, but there is a tendency to then create a division between the Scottish left and the uk left as if there is nothing in common. A federated “bloc” could I suppose operate across the border without stopping a pro- independence section from taking a run at Holyrood. Any thoughts?
Yes, Jeff. Please post a link here.
Sounds interesting, but I haven't seen the Schneider article, Jeff. Could you post it?
Och apologies but it’s a book… anyway here is some of it:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=t7WAEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT10&source=kp_read_button&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&gboemv=1&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
Thanks Jeff. Could you send an email to: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com ++++ Trying to buy this book. A temporary snafu (I am sure) preventing purchase,
This was very illuminating, from a US left perspective.
I still think, both in the UK and the US, new left parties are direly needed; certainly there are complications, but the need outweighs those. The leading problem, as I see it, is "affinity"; not enough left-wing people and factions have bonds above and outside of politics to make the affinities that make coalescing into larger bodies easier.
We have been goaded into self-atomizing too long and too thoroughly and have lost the basic political habits of meeting each other and cooperating. But at all costs and all hazards, that needs taken up again; the sooner the better.
This was very illuminating, from a US left perspective.
I still think, both in the UK and the US, new left parties are direly needed; certainly there are complications, but the need outweighs those. The leading problem, as I see it, is "affinity"; not enough left-wing people and factions have bonds above and outside of politics to make the affinities that make coalescing into larger bodies easier.
We have been goaded into self-atomizing too long and too thoroughly and have lost the basic political habits of meeting each other and cooperating. But at all costs and all hazards, that needs taken up again; the sooner the better.
This was very illuminating, from a US left perspective.
I still think, both in the UK and the US, new left parties are direly needed; certainly there are complications, but the need outweighs those. The leading problem, as I see it, is "affinity"; not enough left-wing people and factions have bonds above and outside of politics to make the affinities that make coalescing into larger bodies easier.
We have been goaded into self-atomizing too long and too thoroughly and have lost the basic political habits of meeting each other and cooperating. But at all costs and all hazards, that needs taken up again; the sooner the better.
"‘To put it another way, thanks to the second lowest turnout since 1885, scarcely 20 percent of eligible British voters support Keir Starmer’s Labour. Yet, he will end up with approximately two-thirds of all parliamentary seats.’"
Media Lens - 'Straight As A Die' - Giving Starmer A Free Pass
https://www.medialens.org/2024/straight-as-a-die-giving-starmer-a-free-pass/
Landslide Victory? With 34% of the vote? And the lowest turnout since 1945.