Goodbye Judean Popular Front

Forget Life of Brian. A new gold standard in satirical references to left wing practices has been established over at the Irish Left Review. In fact it's more or less a complete 11 point guide to establishing a small left wing newspaper. Everyone will have their own favourite but my personal top two are:

*Always see things from the perspective of the international working-class. The perspective of the international working-class is - regardless of superficial appearances - the same perspective as your own

* Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to shout at it.

Ejh - we who are about to be polemicised, we salute you!

(via)

The Power Strikes

So: the oil refinery strike spreads to Sellafield whilst England lies under a blanket of unexpected snow. (Someone, somewhere, on an Emergency Planning Committee is cracking some numbers about energy supplies, I’ll be bound....).

Meanwhile, it appears that the Socialist Party (SP - nee Militant) have established a foothold on the strike committee and played quite a significant role in heading off the possibility of the strikers’ further rhetoric developing along crudely chauvinistic lines.”British Jobs for British Workers” - BJ4BW seems the universally accepted abbreviation - remains a prominent slogan on the News footage, but not in the language of the strike committee. I think this is an Unqualified Good Thing: the BNP seem marginalised.

& the more I think about it the more I think that the idea of opening up jobs – or at least the chance to apply for jobs - on big construction projects to local people is a sound and not particularly revolutionary one. Almost every large scale regeneration bid I’ve ever seen will include some honeyed words promising to recruit local labour in depressed areas. So what’s with this weird interpretation of EU rules which says this doesn’t have to happen in the private sector? If a ‘social Europe’ is to have any meaning at all there is case law that now needs to be overturned by new European legislation. This is certainly within the bounds of the politically possible.

But there are still two aspects to all this which make me feel uneasy.

Firstly, I still think it’s a tiger the SP-influenced strike committee are riding. They may have formulated the strike demands in impeccably defensible language but I don’t doubt for one moment that some of the strikers, particularly those coming out in sympathy on secondary disputes, are not quite so enlightened. There remains a submerged ‘right-populist’ feeling – which is being given expression in many mainstream accounts of the disputes. It could yet rear up again. The underlying sullenness and resentment at the social, economic and cultural marginalisation of the manual working class really hasn’t gone away. Whether it can be diverted into Leftist channels remains to be seen.

Secondly, the actual demands of the strike committee include,

“Union controlled registering of unemployed and locally skilled union members, with nominating rights as work becomes available.” I read this as the Unions asking for the right to control recruitment – although, to be fair, it may merely mean the right to nominate for consideration, not to insist on particular people being given work. But in either event - or certainly in respect of the former, stronger possible interpretation - I think this is a bold demand. I don’t disagree with it – but I do think it runs 180 degree counter to the whole 30 year mantra of ‘allowing management the right to manage’ which we’ve all lived with for so long. Conceding this demand would fatally undermine the basic logic of New Labour and its endless calls for employment ‘flexibility’. It may be intended as a Transitional demand. It will certainly be resisted, bitterly, not just by the employer but also by the government.

As I understand it, a Transitional demand is something which sounds reasonable but which capitalism simply cannot concede in a structural sense. In other words demand the impossible wrapped up as the possible. I never believed that was a good way of getting people to agree with you - they pretty soon worked out you were using them, not working with them in their own immediate interests. I wonder, therefore, whether this is a winnable demand.

I have no contact with the strikers. I hope I’m wrong on both these points. Because putting them together leads to a vision of something pretty unpleasant and pretty combustible.

"...& I'll Cry if I Want To.."

I've been trying to avoid it - no, honestly, I really have - but I can't stay away from the slow implosion of the SWP. It's being covered with perhaps rather ill-hidden glee by a website run by a former ally of theirs in Respect here, and here, and here and...well no doubt a lot of other places as well by the time you get to read this post. Across the Irish Sea Splinty's joined in as well - and the debate on his post is much more sophisticated than on the Socialist Unity site. Comrade Tom Cobbleigh and all are also having their say.

These are most definitely not 'my people'. When I was politically active they would have despised me as a reformist. Or possibly as a Stalinist. Or both. & the distaste, politically speaking, would have been pretty mutual, although that never stopped me being friends with and even sharing flats with SWP members when I was young. But I do accept that twice in my life time - around the Anti-Nazi League at the turn of the '70s/80s and in the Stop the War Coalition - they played pretty vital roles in popular front style movements. (Even if, for reasons of internal theology, they always describe these patently cross class initiatives as 'united fronts', sometimes qualified by the mirth inducing suffix '..of a special type'.)

I've posted before on how the problems within the SWP resonate with my experience in the 1980s Communist Party. & like the CP of old they now seem to have reached the point where they have many more ex members than actual current members. Membership is small and broadly stagnant - ours was dropping of course - and sometimes inflated for the purpose of keeping the troops' spirits up. Effective purchase on political developments is usually more imagined than real. So the question arises of how to make the organisation relevant. The argument gets wrapped up in all sorts of Marxist obscurantism - and is, initially, filtered through purely organisational disagreements and petty 'office politics' amongst the full timers - but it's basically about asking the question, " If we just keep on keeping on why on earth should we expect anything to be different?" The would-be grand priests of theory and of faction then march onto the polemical stage and offer finely honed analyses of Why You Lot Have Been Doing It All Wrong And Why You Should Take My Line (WYLHBDIAWAWYSTML*)

But it's over. In retrospect I can see the people running Marxism Today knew this a generation ago. A Party no longer feels like the correct organisational form from which to change consciousness and culture, even if it is indispensable for fighting elections and pretty helpful in organising demonstrations and the like. A comment from someone called 'ejh' in the Splinty discussion puts this eloquently:

"...it doesn’t really matter if whichever organisation you’re discussing has a better line on this or that, a healthier approach to party democracy, deeper roots in the working-class, a more bottom-up approach to policy-making, a more disciplined approach, a more flexible approach, a less opportunistic approach or whatever the criticism of choice may be. Nobody is making any meaningful progress at all with whatever approach they take, and that’s because the whole idea has come to a dead end. The political habits and ideas on which it depended have withered away."

He goes onto link this to a more general decline in the very idea of working class solidarity, which has clearly also occurred. The manual working class, both unskilled and, especially, skilled is much, much smaller than it once was. An awful lot of the psychic identity of the old organised Labour movement was built on that identification with (predominantly male) manual work alone. The new working class jobs are generally white collar and tend to involve doing repetitive tasks in a sterile environment (think about call centres, or various service industries). As yet, no organisational culture has grown up around such jobs that can be seen as anything like the old trade union workplace solidarity.

But even if it does I can't see a place within it for a 'revolutionary party' of supposedly tightly knit cadres holding the Truth. It's possible one day soon we'll find ourselves with a new 'culture of resistance' as different from what went before as, say, the 'New Unionism' of the 1880s was from the Chartist struggles of a generation previous. I'm sure many current and ex SWP - and Communist, and other left party - members will be part of that culture of resistance.But they won't be a party.

*Co-incidentally also the name of a small railway station that was one of the 'Little Moscows' in the 1930s Rhondda Valley. Dr.Beeching closed it.(N.B. Note for my more serious dialectical friends: this is a joke....)

Once You've Been Evicted From the House It's A Long Way Back.

It's really no use trying to buck the curse of Big Brother. Not even like this. (Actually, especially not like that).

Silliest Web 2.0 Comment 2008 Award

We have our first nomination - and from a Nobel prize winner as well. Though I suspect the sub editor deserves an individual nomination in the 'Buffoon's Headline' category as well. But back to the Nobel prize winner who tells us:

"The spread of information on the Internet has given the world a new tool to forestall conflicts"

Clearly, this person has never been to the discussion threads at either Harry's Place or Socialist Unity.

SWP: Time to Share the Love. No, Really, I Mean It.

A generation ago I was in the old CPGB - I joined because I was impressed with the magazine Marxism Today. The party I joined was both small and in the throws of a civil war. The argument, as I recall, was partly about the relative importance of class and party, as opposed to reaching out towards wider strata. It got unpleasant and it got dirty, as slow motion divorces often do - and, in the end, both sides lost, though hardly for reasons to do with the argument per se. But it did provide a rather engaging spectator sport for much of the rest of the Left.

I can't imagine what has brought this to mind after all this time - oh wait, yes I can: the SWP is about to do a revival of our old theatrical review. They've dumped their leader and a civil war is threatening. So, obviously, there is a part of me which wants to go straight into the tried and trusted tropes of 'the Judea Popular Front' and '1456th time as farce'. Plus make a few encoded comments about how Peter Taaffe et al must be rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of seeing their number 1 competitor in a pretty crowded market place go off into internal strife.

But...I'm older now. That kind of cheap shot is too obvious, and really, really...well, just boring. The reality is that Left political groups, in the main, encourage, even produce, a kind of emotionally two dimensional behaviour. The quixotic search for 'the correct line' gives a sort of ideological cover for the most childish and vicious sort of in-group/our-group definitions of reality. In all honesty, I sometimes wonder if this has put more people off socialism than even the collapse of the Berlin Wall...

I disagree with the SWP. I think their ideas contain the seeds of totalitarianism - they are Leninists,after all. If pushed I could produce a long list of political questions on which I think they've fucked up. But I think the original motivation which brought them to Left politics was, for almost all of them, not that different from mine.

So here's a word of advice: have a good, dignified divorce. Argue out your differences and then part in disagreement but some kind of mutual respect. Don't let 'politics' be winner-take-all in an emotional sense. Think of the kids.

What Ex-Eurocommunists do rather than surf the net for pornography

We read book reviews like this. I think the clue to why this feels dirty might just be in the title:
“Socialism and Left Unity – a Critique of the Socialist Workers Party” . From the Socialist Party, nee Militant, those well known practitioners of Left Unity. Good old fashioned, knockabout 'As-Soon-As-This-Pub-Closes' stuff no doubt.

Mind you, this is just the soft stuff. If we're really feeling perverted we redundant Euros washed up on the tides of history even spy through the keyhole at conversations like this balanced, reasonable and entirely dispassionate discussion of internal shifts of personnel in the SWP Central Committee (234 entries on the discussion thread as I write these words, but rising fast - I wouldn't be surprised to see that thread top 500 contributions).

And- yeah, I know I'm sneering as well. Which isn't nice. What's worse I'll no doubt laugh like a drain when Splintered turns his attention to the matter. But I'll be laughing in despair really. It was ever thus in my youth, as I've mentioned here and here. Why hasn't it got any better?

Update: awh, fooey. Splintered's gone all serious on the SWP thing. I retain hopes of him turning a beady-eye on the Taffe book though.