Anti Imperialism is the key to the situation

Anti-Imperialist Struggle is Key to Liberation, Leon Trotsky-1938

2010-04-12T04:12:00.000-07:00

Trotsky, likely spinning in his grave

Useful antidote to the vagaries of pseudo Trotskyism spewing forth on the British left at present. As the SWP/Workers Power/Socialist Resistance/ Socialist Party et al, call for a vote to the Imperialist, genocidal and thoroughly bankrupt Labour Party in the May 6th General Election, it can be useful to review how far away are these epigones from the class struggle method of the great Russian Revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, whose name they invoke, but whose method they abjure.Active link via clicking title

Fossa: In your opinion what will be the further development of the present situation in Europe?

Trotsky: It is possible that this time too diplomacy will succeed in reaching a rotten compromise. But it will not last long. War is inevitable and moreover in the very near future. One international crisis follows another. These convulsions are similar to the birth pangs of the approaching war. Each new paroxysm will bear a more severe and dangerous character. At present I do not see any force in the world that can stop the development of this process, that is, the birth of war. A horrible new slaughter is relentlessly drawing upon humanity.

Of course, timely revolutionary action by the international proletariat could paralyze the rapacious work of the imperialists. But we must look the truth straight in the face. The working masses of Europe in their overwhelming majority are under the leadership of the Second and Third Internationals. The leaders of the Amsterdam International of Trade Unions fully support the policy of the Second and the Third Internationals and enter together with them into so-called “People’s Fronts.”

The policy of the “People’s Front,” as is shown by the example of Spain, France, and other countries, consists in subordinating the proletariat to the left-wing of the bourgeoisie. But the entire bourgeoisie of the capitalist countries, the right as well as the “left” is permeated through and through with chauvinism and imperialism. The “People’s Front” serves to turn the workers into cannon fodder for their imperialist bourgeoisie. Only that and nothing more.

The Second, the Third, and the Amsterdam Internationals are at present counterrevolutionary organizations whose task it is to put brakes upon and paralyze the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat against “democratic” imperialism. So long as the criminal leadership of these Internationals is not overthrown, the workers will be powerless to oppose war. This is the bitter but inescapable truth. We must know how to face it and not console ourselves with illusions and pacifist babbling. War is inevitable!

Fossa: What will be its effect on the struggle in Spain and on the international working class movement?

Trotsky: In order to understand correctly the nature of the coming events we must first of all reject the false and thoroughly erroneous theory that the coming war will be a war between fascism and “democracy.” Nothing is more false and foolish than this idea. Imperialist “democracies” are divided by the contradictions of their interests in all parts of the world. Fascist Italy can easily find herself in one camp with Great Britain and France if she should lose faith in the victory of Hitler. Semifascist Poland may join one or the other of the camps depending upon the advantages offered. In the course of war the French bourgeoisie may substitute fascism for its “democracy” in order to keep its workers in submission and force them to fight “to the end.” Fascist France, like “democratic” France would equally defend its colonies with weapons in hand. The new war will have a much more openly rapacious imperialist character than the war of 1914-18. Imperialists do not fight for political principles but for markets, colonies, raw materials, for hegemony over the world and its wealth.

The victory of any one of the imperialist camps would mean the definite enslavement of all humanity, the clamping of double chains on present-day colonies, and all weak and backward peoples, among them the peoples of Latin America. The victory of any one of the imperialist camps would spell slavery, wretchedness, misery, the decline of human culture.

What is the way out, you ask? Personally, I do not doubt for a moment that a new war will provoke an international revolution against the rule of the rapacious capitalist cliques over humanity. In wartime all differences between imperialist “democracy” and fascism will disappear. In all countries a merciless military dictatorship will reign. The German workers and peasants will perish just like the French and English. The modern means of destruction are so monstrous that humanity will probably not be able to endure war even a few months. Despair, indignation, hatred will push the masses of all warring countries into an uprising with weapons in hand. Victory of the world proletariat will put an end to war and will also solve the Spanish problem as well as all the current problems of Europe and other parts of the world.

Those working class “leaders” who want to chain the proletariat to the war chariot of imperialism, covered by the mask of “democracy,” are now the worst enemies and the direct traitors of the toilers. We must teach the workers to hate and despise the agents of imperialism, since they poison the consciousness of the toilers; we must explain to the workers that fascism is only one of the forms of imperialism, that we must fight not against the external symptoms of the disease but against its organic causes, that is, against capitalism.

Fossa: What is the perspective for the Mexican revolution? How do you view the devaluation of money in connection with the expropriation of wealth in land and oil?

Trotsky: I cannot dwell on these questions in sufficient detail. The expropriation of land and of the natural wealth are for Mexico an absolutely indispensable measure of national self-defense. Without satisfying the daily needs of the peasantry none of the Latin American countries will retain their independence. The lowering of the purchasing power of money is only one of the results of the imperialist blockade against Mexico which has begun. Material privation is inevitable in struggle. Salvation is impossible without sacrifices. To capitulate before the imperialists would mean to deliver up the natural wealth of the country to despoliation, and the people—to decline and extinction. Of course, the working class organizations must see to it that the rise in the cost of living should not fall with its main weight upon the toilers.

Fossa: What can you say on the liberating struggle of the peoples of Latin America and of the problems of the future? What is your opinion of Aprismo?

Trotsky: I am not sufficiently acquainted with the life of the individual Latin American countries to permit myself a concrete answer on the questions you pose. It is clear to me at any rate that the internal tasks of these countries cannot be solved without a simultaneous revolutionary struggle against imperialism. The agents of the United States, England, France (Lewis, Jouhaux, Toledano, the Stalinists) try to substitute the struggle against fascism for the struggle against imperialism. We have observed their criminal efforts at the recent congress against war and fascism. In the countries of Latin America the agents of “democratic” imperialism are especially dangerous, since they are more capable of fooling the masses than the open agents of fascist bandits.

I will take the most simple and obvious example. In Brazil there now reigns a semifascist regime that every revolutionary can only view with hatred. Let us assume, however, that on the morrow England enters into a military conflict with Brazil. I ask you on whose side of the conflict will the working class be? I will answer for myself personally—in this case I will be on the side of “fascist” Brazil against “democratic” Great Britain. Why? Because in the conflict between them it will not be a question of democracy or fascism. If England should be victorious, she will put another fascist in Rio de Janeiro and will place double chains on Brazil. If Brazil on the contrary should be victorious, it will give a mighty impulse to national and democratic consciousness of the country and will lead to the overthrow of the Vargas dictatorship. The defeat of England will at the same time deliver a blow to British imperialism and will give an impulse to the revolutionary movement of the British proletariat. Truly, one must have an empty head to reduce world antagonisms and military conflicts to the struggle between fascism and democracy. Under all masks one must know how to distinguish exploiters, slave-owners, and robbers!

In all the Latin American countries the problems of the agrarian revolution are indissolubly connected with anti-imperialist struggle. The Stalinists are now treacherously paralyzing both one and the other. To the Kremlin the Latin American countries are just small change in its dealings with the imperialists. Stalin says to Washington, London, and Paris, “Recognize me as an equal partner and I will help you put down the revolutionary movement in the colonies and semicolonies; for this I have in my service hundreds of agents like Lombardo Toledano.” Stalinism has become the leprosy of the liberating movement.

I do not know Aprismo sufficiently to give a definite judgment. In Peru the activity of this party has an illegal character and is therefore hard to observe. The representatives of APRA at the September congress against war and fascism in Mexico have taken, so far as I can judge, a worthy and correct position together with the delegates from Puerto Rico. It remains only to hope that APRA does not fall prey to the Stalinists as this would paralyze the liberating struggle in Peru. I think that agreements with the Apristas for definite practical tasks are possible and desirable under the condition of full organizational independence.

Fossa: What consequences will the war have for the Latin American countries?

Trotsky: Doubtless both imperialist camps will strive to drag the Latin American countries into the whirlpool of war in order to enslave them completely afterwards. Empty “antifascist” noise only prepares the soil for agents of one of the imperialist camps. To meet the world war prepared, the revolutionary parties of Latin America must right now take an irreconcilable attitude toward all imperialist groupings. On the basis of the struggle for self-preservation the peoples of Latin America should rally closer to each other.

In the first period of war the position of the weak countries can prove very difficult. But the imperialist camps will become weaker and weaker with each passing month. Their mortal struggle with each other will permit the colonial and semicolonial countries to raise their heads. This refers, of course, also to the Latin American countries; they will be able to achieve their full liberation, if at the head of the masses stand truly revolutionary, anti-imperialist parties and trade unions. From tragic historic circumstances one cannot escape by trickery, hollow phrases, and petty lies. We must tell the masses the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Fossa: What in your opinion are the tasks and the methods facing the trade unions?

Trotsky: In order that the trade unions should be able to rally, educate, mobilize the proletariat for a liberating struggle they must be cleansed of the totalitarian methods of Stalinism. The trade unions should be open to workers of all political tendencies under the conditions of discipline in action. Whoever turns the trade unions into a weapon for outside aims (especially into a weapon of the Stalinist bureaucracy and “democratic” imperialism) inevitably splits the working class, weakens it, and opens the door to reaction. A full and honest democracy within the unions is the most important condition of democracy in the country.

In conclusion I ask you to transmit my fraternal greetings to the workers of Argentina. I don’t doubt that they do not believe for a moment those disgusting slanders that the Stalinist agencies have spread in the entire world against me and my friends. The struggle that the Fourth International carries on against the Stalinist bureaucracy is a continuation of the great historic struggle of the oppressed against the oppressors, of the exploited against the exploiters. The international revolution will free all the oppressed, including the workers of the USSR.

Socialist Party want to talk to the fascist English Defence League

2010-04-09T04:55:00.000-07:00

The Socialist Party (CWI) have a long and to them proud tradition of giving a platform to fascists, coppers, screws, Ulster loyalist fascists, and all manner of far right opinion. This is couched in terms of 'winning the battle of ideas', and 'combating reactionary ideas within the working class'. This tradition is alive and kicking in the present battle against the fascist English Defence League. A recent article (click title for link) makes the case for not calling a spade a spade, or in this case ultra right wing racists ultra right wing racists, on basis that it alienates them! An SP hack manages the following in a report of an anti fascists meeting in Bristol in late March, where 15 or so fascists from the EDL gate crashed the event:

"While waiting for the police a trade unionist spoke to one of the EDL members and found they had no political argument to back up their attacks on Muslims. He couldn't explain what the EDL meant by Islamic fundamentalism.

They took offence at being called racists or fascists. One was a plumber who had been out of work since last May. It appeared to the trade unionist that they were being manipulated by racists for their own political aims and objectives.

This shows the complicated and confused nature of those attracted to the EDL. It is crucial that genuine and democratic discussion and debate takes place on how to challenge racism and the far-right."

So, a member of a fascist organisation which is currently rampaging across Britain attacking Asian people, and specifically Muslims, is OK and just a bit confused because he is an unemployed plumber. This rank economism-whitewashing racism and pro-bosses politics within the working class on basis that such politics are just confused forms of trade union/class politics-is at the heart of SP approaches to building a new Labour Party to better represent the skilled trade union working class, with the recruitment of screws union leader, Brian Caton, merely the lowest point in the recent trajectory of this minor party of British Imperialism.

The SP call for open and democratic debate is an invitation to the supporters of the EDL, not others on the so called British left. The intention is clear: talk to fascists; convince them that the sort of right wing reformism the SP trot out, with its anti immigrant and pro-war positions, is the real form of protest that trade unionists and lumpen scum should take, not openly fascist and racist groups.

The SP have always preferred not to refer to the BNP and other such groups as “fascist,” choosing instead to describe them as “far-right,” “racist,” “homophobic” or “sexist.” The SP’s reluctance derives from a desire not to alienate BNP supporters:

“...where people are voting to punish New Labour merely calling the BNP ‘fascists’ is counter-productive. It is the BNP leadership who are fascists, not the voters and even some members do not agree with these far-right ideas.

“During elections when Socialist Party activists have spoken to people with ‘Vote BNP’ window posters they have patiently explained and discussed with them. Some have swapped their posters over on the basis of seeing the need for a united working-class party.”
—Socialist, 10 July 2008

The SP has a history of cheer leading the forces of fascist reaction. In January 2008, when 20,000 coppers marched on Westminster to demanding more pay for more anti working class repression, the SP sought to give this reactionary mobilization a leftist platform:

“This is in many ways a momentous occasion, since the last time they took any action over pay was 1919....

“Socialist Party members got a mixed response but there was clearly a strong underlying anger at the government....

“Unusually compared to most demonstrations, the police did not talk the numbers down! And the Police Federation had to distance themselves from the presence of the BNP’s London Mayoral candidate on the march.”
—Socialist, 30 January 2008

The “BNP’s London Mayoral candidate,” Richard Barnbrook, the Greater London Assembly member, was not merely “present”—he marched right at the head of the demonstration. He “had been told by officers that he was welcome and said a number of the protesting police officers had agreed to be interviewed for BNP TV” (Guardian [London], 24 January 2008).

The SP clearly have a crush on Barnbrook, as six months later they had a cosy chat with him in London, asking him:

“what about the BNP councillors in Stoke or Kirklees who voted for cuts and privatisation and tax increases—or don’t even bother to turn up to the council chambers?

“Barnbrook handily didn’t know anything about that. So we explained it to him—the BNP pretend to be the party for the white working class but when they get in the council chamber they preside over cuts, the same as the three main parties.”
—Socialist, 14 May 2008

By going down this road the SP leadership teach their deluded younger members that fascism is merely a set of ideas suitable for discussion and debate. This is entirely wrong. The BNP poses a deadly danger to leftists and all the oppressed—the only way to “explain” anything to a fascist is through a baseball bat to the skull and a construction boot to the teeth.

The SP also travel North of the Border to snuggle with the fascists. When the BNP was trying to expand its activity in Glasgow’s heavily working-class Pollock area in September 1989, hundreds of energetic anti-fascist youths met to discuss how to respond. Militant, as the SP was then known, asked for a debate:

“We decided to challenge the fascists to an open debate—originally to be held in a local football ground. Some of the youth wanted to take matters into their own hands. But we said we should wait until we had this meeting. Although normally we wouldn’t have considered debating the fascists we realised we could thoroughly discredit them in the eyes of the youth—and thought they probably wouldn’t turn up anyway.”
—Militant, 22 September 1989

On 20 September 2008, 350 fascists held a rally in Stoke to commemorate a BNP thug, Keith Brown, who was killed a year earlier when his neighbor, Habib Khan, found Brown strangling his son. The SP, which participated in a “peace and unity vigil” held as a counter-rally to the BNP event, made the incredible claim that “Keith Brown was tragically stabbed to death by his Muslim neighbour over a year ago” (Socialist, 23 September 2008). The only tragedy of this righteous kill was that the heroic Habib Khan was sent down for 8 years! The slogan of 'self defence is no offence' becomes 'self defence is wrong as it alienates murderous fascists!

The SP long ago crossed the Rubicon of diseased socialism. It is time they fully embraced the logic of such politics and offered the BNP and the EDL a platform as part of their racist and anti immigrant Trade Union and Socialist Coalition.

Can't keep a good nation down.

2010-03-30T01:21:00.000-07:00

US Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte on a tour of the death squad scarred battlefield.

The Iraqi elections have finally formally ended, 20 or more days after they began (click title for link). The result, with a US imposed dictator becoming an 'elected' Prime Minister, displays the utter cynicism which now defines colonial 'democracy' under the Obama stewardship of US Imperialism. Iyal Allawi won a two seat majority in the national Parliament, ahead of former PM Nouri al-Maliki, with both claiming mass electoral fraud and intimidation against the other side. Massive fraud is the bread and butter of elections in US dependencies, witnessed recently in Afghanistan and Honduras, but the crux issue has been who is allowed to stand and who is not. This election took place at a time when the US media and state were ramping up attacks against the Cuban and Venezuelan revolutions for alleged undemocratic forms, yes, Obama and company have literally no shame, as it takes quite a leap of hagiography to ignore the 7 years of occupation in Iraq as the backdrop to this coronation. The justice and accountability commission – the organisation charged with pursuing the de-Ba'athification process set in train by the Americans in 2003 – has issued edicts seeking to ban 511 individual candidates and 14 party lists from the elections. On the eve of the vote the commission banned a further 50 candidates. Meanwhile, Ali Faisal al-Lami, the head of the justice and accountability commission, also ran as a parliamentary candidate, in a blatant conflict of interest indicative of a system where governmental institutions have been colonised by political parties and run as private fiefdoms. This follows mass banning of all opponents of the occupation in 2005 and 2007. It also follows the banning of anti-occupation trade unions, especially in the crucial oil sector which has been parcelled out to US and UK oil transnationals. Most chillingly of all it follows the work of John Negroponte as Ambassador to Iraq and his well worn policy of death squad warfare to silence anti Imperialist and pro-democracy opposition, a method he honed in Latin America under the Reaganite counter revolution of the 1980s. On April 20, 2004, Bush nominated Negroponte as ambassador to Iraq, stating that, "he has done a really good job of speaking for the United States to the world about our intentions to spread freedom and peace." Calling him "a man of enormous experience and skill"-in organising the rape and murder of men and women across the globe! (see this article for a review of this fascists work-http://www.ww4report.com/negropontedeathsquad). Negroponte oversaw the build up of Kurdish and Shiite Militias which were then used to murder Sunni resistance fighters, as well as other resistance forces. This strategy proved succesful, with former anti occupation forces around Moqtada al-Sadr joining the fray and taking a place within the US security fold, all in return for legitimacy and offices of state of course. As Major General Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani SAID IN 2005 "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation." Threatening everyone in a village with torture and death, if the village is deemed a potential base insurgent operations can be a very effective technique, whether the perpetrators are the Nazi SS in occupied Czechoslovakia, the death squads in El Salvador, or the new forces created under Negropontes watch in Iraq, such as the "Saraya Iraqna," which began offering big wads of American cash for insurgent scalps--up to $50,000, the Iraqi paper Al Ittihad reported. "Our activity will not be selective," the group promised. This strategy of tactical terror aimed to sever an insurgency from it's potential base of support. In the case of 40% refusing to vote in the Iraqi elections this approach would seem to have paid off.

Here we have it, Imperialist democracy, death squads and ballot boxes fiddled and stolen. Yet despite this fraud and repression, and despite the 100k plus US Troops still occupying Iraq, the resistance still fights and with no sign of capitulation. Al Sadr and other satraps trade offices for resistance, as many national liberation forces have done before, but the root cause of the resistance-US Imperialist occupation-means that new forces, new methods, and new fighters constantly emerge and renew the ranks, just as they have always done in the war against Imperialism.

Defend the right to protest! Defend the Gaza Demonstrators!

2010-03-29T16:07:00.000-07:00

Below is an article from the Revolutionary Communist Group. Click title for link to original.

The British state has moved to marginalise those who want to resist imperialism in this country, and especially to criminalise those who take a militant stance against Zionism. In the course of 2009, 119 mostly young and predominantly Muslim people were arrested in connection with the demonstrations outside the London Israeli embassy in December 2008- January 2009 against Israel's murderous attack on the people of Gaza. 78 of them were charged; so far around 30 have received prison sentences and court cases continue. FRFI is participating in the campaign to defend and support all those facing the racist vengeance of the British state and joined the demonstration outside Isleworth Crown Court on 26 March, when the latest sentences were passed.
At least 1,400 Palestinians died in Israel’s Operation 'Cast Lead'; 5,500 were injured and tens of thousands left homeless. There was worldwide outrage and thousands took to the streets to voice their opposition and disgust. London was the scene of daily militant demonstrations around the Israeli Embassy.

The British police retaliated brutally, ‘kettling’ and batonning demonstrators. Since then dozens of protestors have been arrested. Most of the arrests took place six months after the demonstrations, following dawn raids during which the police handcuffed entire families and confiscated electronic material.

Most of those arrested were aged 16-20 years old, but some were just 15, and the youngest 12. The vast majority have been charged with violent disorder, which can carry a prison sentence of up to five years. At court almost all the defendants were required to surrender their passports and, despite the fact that they are overwhelmingly British citizens, all were served with immigration notices which stated that they could be deported depending on the outcome of criminal proceedings.

Judge Denniss, who is presiding over the vast majority of the cases, has made it clear that he is deliberately using harsh sentences as a deterrent to others in the future. These are political sentences; they are intended to criminalise protest and they are specifically aimed at the Muslim community in an attempt to frighten people away from public protests.

Two women, aged 18 and 19 were sentenced to 15 months imprisonment. One was subsequently released following an appeal against the length of her sentence. A Palestinian man, who days before had seen images in the press of the dead bodies of two of his cousins in Gaza, has been gaoled for two years for violent disorder. A humanities student, who is the father of a five-month old baby also received two years. A dental student who threw a plastic bottle in the direction of the Israeli embassy has received a 12-month sentence. So far all those imprisoned have accepted legal advice to plead guilty. The trials of those maintaining not guilty pleas have recently begun. On 24 March the case against Jake Smith was dropped, when it became apparent that the police had selectively edited video footage.

For more details of the campaign to support the Gaza protesters, go to http://gazademosupport.org.uk

The Latin American disease is Imperialist capitalism.

2010-03-26T02:34:00.000-07:00

"ITS economies may have improved recently, but much of Latin America has performed poorly over the past two generations. The gap in income per head between the region and developed countries has widened since 1960, while many east Asian countries that were poorer have leapfrogged ahead. The root cause has been Latin America’s slow—or even negative—growth in productivity."(1)

And so begins a new report attempting to place the mal-development of Latin America within the discourse of productivity growth. The report fails on this 'productivity growth is the holy grail of development' foundation, it is not. But what does productivity growth mean? Well, simply put it means—gains in the efficiency with which capital, labour and technology are used in an economy. During the apparent heyday of productivity growth in the nations of advanced(Imperialist)capitalism, say from 1950-1975, productivity growth was averaging 4% per annum, due to high rates of investment in capital goods; infrastructure projects et al. The report makes much play of this comparison with Latin America, where:

"the short answer is that the typical Latin American firm is a small, inefficient service business and may well be operating in the informal economy. Productivity growth tends to be higher in manufacturing and agriculture than in services (see chart 2). It also tends to be higher in large firms which benefit from economies of scale. And it is much higher in formal businesses, which can invest in innovation.

However, Latin American manufacturers are also much less productive than they might be. This is partly because clogged, inefficiently run ports, airports and other transport systems make freight costs unduly high—for example, it shockingly costs more to get goods to the United States from most Latin American countries than it does from distant China or Europe.

But 60% of Latin Americans work in service firms. Many of these businesses are held back by lack of credit and by public policies that give them little or no incentive to become bigger or to operate legally. Latin American tax codes are inordinately complicated: it takes an average of 320 hours per year for a firm in the region to file its tax paperwork, compared with 177 hours in rich countries. The IDB found that a disproportionate share of tax is paid by big companies. Simplified tax regimes for small companies have been set up in 13 of the 17 countries the bank studied. Perversely, that encourages them to remain small."

For those not dominated intellectually and politically by pro-capitalist development ideology, such sweeping statements and half formed data sets provide little more than an example of the capacity of social scientists to pawn themselves to Imperialist capitalism. It is impossible to speak of Latin America in general. Mexico is massively different than Honduras, and Cuba is massively different to every other Latin American state. It is this comparative method-not comparing like with like-which allows a technically correct conclusion of low productivity growth. If we in fact break the region down into its constituent parts then we can come to find states with very impressive growth in productivity. For example, Cuba has managed to become a leading bio-tech state and make enormous strides in development the productivity of agriculture and industry, despite the US imposed blockade and constant subversion. It has managed all of this due to an internalisation of the concept developed by Che Guevara that capitalism had become impossible in the dependent countries by the 1950s. Similar recognition has been accepted in Venezuela and Bolivia, where socialist Presidents and mass movements have taken huge steps towards breaking the shackles of landlord-ism and capitalism, although the failure as yet to fully de-link from the Imperialist world system has meant the revolutionary processes are very much still in danger.(2)

The report reads less like an attempt to understand the true causes of development decay, and more like a snap shot, a literal stitch in time, of a region which has a rich and varied history, born of collosal struggles for the very development the reports authors make clear are the basis for poverty alleviation and sustainable development. No mention is made of the 5%growth of the Argentinian and Brazilian economies in the period from the late 1930s to the 1960s; no mention is made of the growth under nationalist regimes throughout the entire hemisphere, including Mexico. Such uncomfortable truths are omitted so as not to spoil the discourse flowing like swine effluent from the heartland of Imperialism-Washington and Wall Street. The conclusion, at odds with history, must always be: the state should get out of development, should reduce taxes, privatise and export raw materials and finished goods. This is how Brazil can be taken as a model. The report states: "Productivity growth in Brazil has surged recently: after being negative in the late 1990s, it rose to over 2% in 2007 and 2008 according to the Central Bank." This in a country the size of the USA, and yet with an economy smaller than Italy's, and in which the income gap is the highest of anywhere in the world, and where the status of women, children and the rural poor is akin to the time of the rampaging Slavocracy.(3) Brazil's government, whether under the conservative Cardosa, or the 'socialist' Lula, has consistently championed the rural latifundia ranchers and their genocidal model of development based upon cattle, biofuels and soya export, a model implicated in both the extreme hunger of the increasingly landless workers in the enormous Brazilian hinterlands, but also the direct murder of landless workers who resist heroically the logical outcome of 'increasing capitalist productivity'.(4)

The 800 pound gorilla in the room, as with all of the guff produced by 'elite' institutions in the West and North, is the refusal to place human development at the heart of an approach to development. It would be quite possible for Latin America to grow by 10% per year for 30 yrs and see very little in the way of social and human index progress. The experience of the restoration of capitalism in China, with its attendant destruction of the welfare state, family agriculture, the rights of workers etc should be a warning to anybody who is taken in by the narrow focus on productivity growth.(5) Human development placed front and centre has allowed the Venezuelan revolution to reduce poverty from 70% to less than 20%, whilst all but eliminating extreme poverty. All this whilst facing the threat of constant counter-revolution and external invasion. These poverty rates measure only cash income; they do not include non-cash benefits to the poor such as access to health care or education. If Venezuela were almost any other country, such a large reduction
of poverty in a relatively short time would be noticed as a significant achievement. However, since the Venezuelan government, and especially its president, Hugo Chávez Frías, are consistently disparaged in major media, government, and most policy and intellectual circles, this has not happened. Instead, the reduction in poverty
was for quite some time denied, although it acts as a beacon for the masses in the dominated countries of the global South and East.(6)

The problem of growth and development is political, not primarily economic, and social, not cultural. Latin America is a region richer in raw materials and productive workers and small farmers than any reasonable level of social development could require. The basis is there for a rich continental economy united and integrated on a firm anti Imperialist and socialist basis, using the pioneering example of Cuba as both guide and goal. The obstacle is the vampire of the North, sucking the lifeblood and the wealth from the South via policies based on the report reviewed here; demanding and securing access to cash crop exports and dollar earnings for debt; demanding access to national firms for purchase and incorporation; demanding that capitalist classes toe the line with the US Empire, and of course receiving such fealty. Resistance was met in the 50s, 60s and 70s by fascist coups and military dictatorships, which goes a long way to explain why the develop-mentalist strategies which proved so successful in the past broke down and became discredited. This is where Guevara's legacy is so important. Not for him was capitalism in the dependent countries simply obsolete in the abstract, no, for Guevara it had become obsolete because the small window of opportunity for a national capitalism had closed with the end of WW2 and the emergence of the US as the global counter revolutionary force. Faced with a revolutionary struggle against Imperialism, mobilising the workers and farmers for land reforms and pro worker economic and social policies, the capitalist classes of the dependent countries baulked and capitulated. In that sense only is capitalism obsolete in Latin America. The fact that moderately reformist governments such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela have become radicalised and anti-capitalist merely proves that point, as the Cuban revolution did before it. The ALBA alliance of the Americas, incorporating Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and several smaller nations-based on non capitalist, non market exchanges-points towards the sort of social and economic exchange required to liberate Latin America and the Caribbean from the nightmare of Imperialist capitalism. The movements of the last decade must settle accounts with domestic and regional capitalist classes. The US will not be bogged down in West Asia forever. The Columbian option of renewed counter revolutionary warfare and subversion will move back centre stage, assisted by domestic capitalists.(7)

(1) The Age of Productivity: Transforming Economies from the Bottom Up, edited by Carmen Pagés, Inter-American Development Bank and Palgrave Macmillan.
(2)Helen Yaffe, Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution, MacMillan, 2009
(3)James Petras, Empire with Imperialism: The Globalizing Dynamics of Neoliberal Capitalism, Luciano Vasapollo, Zed Books, 2006
(4)Wright and Wolford. To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil, Food First Books, 2003.
(5)see, http://monthlyreview.org/100201hart-landsberg.php
(6)Mark Weisbrot, Poverty Reduction in Venezuela: A Reality-Based View, ReVista, Harvard Review of Latin America, Fall 2008
(7)http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/mar/18/venezuela-election

Yet more pseudo lefts are calling on people to vote Labour.

2010-03-25T09:40:00.000-07:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/24/budget-public-intervention-british-economy

The above article, by Seamus Milne, alleges that the budget heralds a return to Old Labour'-how very convenient that this can then justify a vote for Labour. I wonder which Old Labour? Is it the one which presided over the dispossession of the colonial masses; the poorest sections of the working class here; the 1970s Monetarism; the post WW2 unprecedented theft of colonial resources and ramped up colonial genocide under Major Clement Attlee. Which Old Labour does he mean? And no surprise that the bloated journalists who herald a return to Old Labour based upon a few crumbs of reforms for the poorest in Britain ignore the increased funding for the military, that is, for increased murder and theft of wealth from poor people in West Asia, occupied Ireland et al. Imperialist socialism may be revived a wee bit under darling and Brown; it is still Imperialism. The economism of the left, an economism which excludes migrant workers, refugees, those locked up in the increasingly privatised jail system, those who are not trade union members etc is alive and kicking with this election and the sort of journalism we see above. The likes of Woolas/Blunkett/Hodge/Frank Filed et al are omitted because it does tarnish the view somewhat, it being hard to call for a vote to a government and party in which out and out racists and in the case of Woolas and Blunkett-fascists- play leading and state sanctioned roles.

The rise of British fascism? nowt to do with Labour, guv'

2010-03-22T09:05:00.000-07:00

http://www.workerspower.com/index.php?id=47,2325,0,0,1,0

Above is a link to a report of the recent fascist and anti fascist demos in Bolton. The report, by Trotskyist group Workers Power, makes much of the size of the contending forces, and shrieks a great deal about the fight against fascism being the key struggle of today. The reality is sadly different. The same day that a small gang of racists demonstrated against the tabloid and state created 'Islamic extremism' (anti Imperialist resistance) also witnessed the Labour Party in government deporting refugees to terror regimes; locking kids up in prisons; sexually assaulting male and female migrants and refugees detained by the 'worker in uniform' immigration cops. What do the Trots have to say about this? nowt, they actively collaborate with the state racists and social fascists of the Labour Party to cover it up! The Nazi bogeyman discourse was an invention of the Labour Party and the Socialist Workers Party in the 1970s as a way of derailing opposition to the racist and Imperialist Labour Party and trade union movement. The shadow Trots of Workers Power and their ilk merely talk this script left, whilst being careful not to mention the unmentionable reality of a labour movement so compromised by its actions and history as to be completely unsupportable. Fascism IS a growing threat in working class communities, especially the multi ethnic communities of the North and Midlands, not to mention London. Communists and anti Imperialists should be to the fore in that fight-focused as it must be against the true perpetrators of racist scapegoating of Muslims and those resisting Imperialism-the state and the main bosses parties, including the party which has been in the vanguard of this one sided war for 13 years-the Labour Party! This is rejected by the self styled vanguard of Workers Power/SWP etc who have come out once again in a 'Vote Labour and fight for socialism' frenzy. If Trotsky had not been cremated then this blogger is sure he would be turning in his grave.

Vote Labour-Vote to have your schools given away to parasites.

2010-02-25T12:04:00.000-08:00

The Labour Party, not content with the trillion pound bail out of the bankers, now plans to extend its 'flagship' academy schools program to allow universities and bosses to run the worst performing schools. Academies were originally developed as a way to allow business types to take over a school in the state sector by putting up two million quid, and having the complete control over subsequent budgets, curriculum, and also hiring and firing. Around 200 academies have opened so far and the anti working class Labour Party has consistently promised to speed up the programme in coming years. This has proved very profitable to the social parasites who have leached hundreds of millions from state education over the past decade, but a complete disaster for working class pupils and teachers.

The long term goal has been to allow academies to become selective schools, excluding poorer pupils with learning problems, whilst channelling the 'brighter' pupils (those from middle class and upper working class backgrounds who have stable home lives and the money for computers, learning support etc) into academic streams. Working class pupils are directed to a myriad of pseudo subjects related to media and communication studies, neither of which are recognised as genuine subjects by universities. This would allow better off parents to avoid having to bear the cost of sending their brats private-yet another case of the welfare state being used to support the labour aristocracy and the middle classes!

Even this revanchist goal has proven unachievable under the bosses system. The constant theft of money which should go on pupils, but is funnelled into the pockets of the sponsors, who, incidentally no longer even have to put up any front money, means that academies are failing. Sheffield Park Academy - opened last year by the Duke of York following a £30m redevelopment - will become the third of the academies in South Yorkshire schools to be placed in "special measures". The school replaced a conventional comprehensive which was said to be making "reasonable progress" before shutting. Sheffield Park's sister school, Sheffield Springs Academy, which is also run by the United Learning Trust, a front for the fundamentalists of the Anglican Church, received a critical judgement from Ofsted in June of 2009. Its teaching was said to be inadequate, although Ofsted stopped short of placing it in special measures due to political pressure. Earlier in 2009, the Richard Rose Central Academy in Carlisle was placed in special measures following a protest over poor behaviour and teaching by parents. Its chief executive, who was recruited from the NHS without any teaching experience, subsequently quit. Unity City Academy in Middlesbrough was also placed in special measures, linked to the influence of fundamentalist Christian Richard Vardy, who has sole control of curriculum in the school, one of more than ten schools he has stolen.

This attempt to out do the tories in the run up to an election shows just whose side the Brownites/Blairites and union leaders are on-the bosses and the middle class wannabees of the better off workers. Those who think Labour will somehow become pro working class after defeat are pissing into the wind. Even with 13 years of faithful knee cushion and lip balm service to the lords of humankind in the boss class, Labour feel such fealty to their mates and peers that they have to just keep giving and giving. Lord Harris, who founded Carpetright and already runs several London academies, is included in a list of sponsors who will be allowed to run multiple schools, all of them with state money-that's working class taxes-and outside of any local democratic control. Brown trotted out the usual blandishments regarding ambition, excellence etc in what will prove a failed attempt to stop the Tories from winning the general election in May, stating: "Local authorities will be able to draw on the world-class excellence in these new chains to drive up standards in weaker schools. And primary schools themselves will be able to opt to join a chain. The evidence is clear – schools often work best when they work together. When schools partner with other schools - operating under a common leadership brand, with a shared ethos, and a shared commitment to excellence – standards are raised for all; the stronger schools and the weaker schools." This is regardless of the proven failure of his project to raise standards, even on its own anti working class terms.

For those revolutionaries who think voting Labour, and that telling working and unemployed people to vote Labour is a smart tactic which will 'help organise the resistance', to coin the term of one particularly deluded old labourite in one of the myriad micro sects which despoil the political landscape, a reckoning will await them in the future when workers have to fight tooth and nail against the racist, Imperialist and viciously anti working class Labour Party, as they have had to do, like millions in West Asia and beyond for a decade or more. The question will be raised of those like the SWP who support the Labour Party: 'where were you when my school/hospital/job was being destroyed by the bosses and the Labour Party'? The job of genuine communists is to expose this socialist support for our class enemies whenever and wherever we get the chance. The SWP and their ilk have crossed the Rubicon, as they have many times before, in choosing to support our class enemies.

No support to Jerry Hicks for Unite leader

2010-02-18T15:26:00.000-08:00

Jerry Hicks, long time shop steward in the skilled trades, and a member of Respect, plans to contest the election for the General Secretary of the Unite super union this summer. Hicks got almost 40,000 votes against Simpson entirely outside the bureaucratic structures of the union itself and the usual suspects of the SWP and Socialist party backed 'United Left'. The candidacy has mustered all manner of bluster and wondrous imaginings from the permanent labourites of what passes for a Trotskyist left. Gerry downing, of the two man Socialist Fight group has this to say about Hicks candidacy:

"His election would strike a real blow to the bureaucracy and would enable us to begin to develop the basis of a real rank-and-file movemnent in the Buses and in other industries if we go about it the right way. The Manchester Right To Work meeting called for a rank-and-file movement and those of us who know what that should look like - no bureaucrats or union employees voting, workers wage for officials, standing for all electable positions against the bureaucracy answarable to the R+F movement, direct and participatory democratic structures, etc - have an opportunity to start fighting for it in a wider context, The SWP has not yet committed to Hicks, but it is difficult to see them not doing so after Manchester, the SP seems committed to McCluskey (although Jerry says after a meeting with them that he is "hopeful"), the AWL and Workers Power will surely back him so a real fight is in the offing. Sectarians will use the Lindsey excuse to abandon the class yet again....Many of us had difference with Jerry over Lindsey and I am not saying that we put those aside in any way but it would be criminal to allow these differences to balck participation in this campaign rather than fighting them out whenever we think they are holding the campaign back."(mistakes in original)

The capitulation to lesser evilism is strong on the labourite Trot left, and this is only a particularly shameless example. The most obvious absurdity is to base support on the number of votes won in an election. 40k is a drop in the ocean when compared to the vote for Simpson or Woodley, both of whom would trounce Hicks in an election. Secondly, what was this vote based on? Hicks postured a a left supporter of the reactionary Lindsey strikes, giving four square support for the racist verbal attacks and job thefts against international workers, whilst advising that perhaps it was best not to use reactionary slogans in the next round of strikes, which he then supported! He received such a surprise vote because the chauvinist wave, understandable given the reactionary politics of the pro Labour union tops, created an anti leadership mood based on the misguided perception that the union leadership were not doing enough to defend British workers exclusive rights to jobs and bailouts-precisely at the time when their union leaders were signing up to state sponsored and bosses funded campaigns to 'defend British manufacturing'! The bluster from Gerry Downing regarding people using Hicks support for anti working class strikes as 'excuses' for allegedly 'abandoning the class' would carry more weight if they did not come at a time when Downing and his comrade were urging Marxists to call for a vote to the viciously and openly anti working class Labour Party, surely the definition of abandoning the class.

Oh, he may have a dodgy record of backing the labour aristocracy over the class, but he is gonna build a rank and file movement, he even promised to do so at the Right to Work Conference. If Gerry were able to think a point through to the end then he may see the contradiction in that point. A person with a reactionary record standing for the leadership of a union-the arch bureaucrats position-claims he is going to build a grouping which will undermine his own power? Come of it Ger, if Hicks were committed to a rank and file then he would use his position and stable employment as a very skilled worker at Rolls Royce to build such a rank and file.

The Socialist Party are most likely to support the United Left candidate as part of their fealty drive towards the Stalinists who control large swathes of the union structures in Britain, and who are crucial to win the support of in the battle to form a new-old Labour Party. Support for Hicks is a diversion from the struggle against such politics-the politics of class collaboration-which define workers organisations today. Gerry makes no mention of why Hicks would be suspect in this war against class collaboration, the small matter of his membership of George Galloway's Respect Party, a party established to unite the classes, laid out clearly at the founding conference: "The national politicisation of the anti-war movement is now a necessary next stage in our own bloodless war of national liberation. The reality of the movement means that what we create must operate at two levels.‘The first level requires steps towards a mass unifying movement of grassroots radicals to hobble the State, bring it under popular control and complete an unfinished radical democratic revolution. This level will unite Muslims, Christians and Jews, socialists, liberal and conservatives, men, women and the disadvantaged of all types in one movement of democratic liberation.
(http://english.aljazeera.net).

How any consistent Marxist can support such a reactionary and house broken class collaborator is beyond the comprehension of this blogger.

Downing could cling to the concept that this is all just smart tactics and the united front? 'We don't think he will do as he says, but the leading sections of the class do, and for this reason we must expose him'? Except this is not what Gerry and his ilk do. No, they instead take Hicks, paint him red, then pop a cherry on top and call it progress. Gerry actually thinks this popular frontist will do as he says, is progress, and will lead forward the class struggle! He supports Hicks not because he seeks to expose him, after all the layer who support him is small and proven reactionaries.No, Gerry supports Hicks because he views a man who supports reactionary strikes and wishes to continue using union monies to fund the racist and Imperialist Labour Party because he has stagist view of clas struggle. First we support anything/body who is less worse than an alternative; then, later we start the actual class struggle against such half way houses. For now it is best to keep stum and be polite.

This may well be Gerry Downing's approach. It certainly is not Trotskyist tactics. With this in mind it is perhaps advisable that Downing remove the Trotsky quote from his paper, lest he fool anybody with this epigone Marxism.

Double Dip Recession: we need to organize to fight back!

2010-02-17T04:13:00.000-08:00

The bosses are increasingly fearing a double dip recession, that is a return to recession after the small climb out of recession late last year. Companies surveyed for the British Chamber of Commerce want a dual strategy from whoever wins the next election: cut sending and reduce the £178 billion budget deficit, whilst also demanding support in the form of continued state aid to the financial system. Either way, be it through cuts in services, jobs and pay; or in increased taxes to reduce the deficit (with a 1% increase in VAT the choice for most businesses)it is clear that ordinary people are going to be forced to pay.(1)

The collapse of Dubai's financial system late last year put the fear of god into ruling elites that a new contagion was on the way. The relatively mild after effects did cause a brief period of relief, boosted by earnings reports of the major Western Banks. The money banks have been making in recent months is all predicated on state bail outs. The state creates money and lends it at 0.25%. The banks lend it out at 4%, 5% for Mortgages, or even lend it back to the government at above 3%. Meanwhile, though, the banks are compounding things by refusing to lend the money to the mainstreet. The money lent by US and UK banks has fallen every month for the past nine months. The profits of the industrial sector-the real economy-continue to decline, although the boom in China has lessened the fears of major energy and mining corporations.

China to the Rescue?

Figures published on Thursday January 21st showed that Chinese GDP grew by 10.7% year on year in the fourth quarter. Industrial production jumped by 18.5% in the year to December, while retail sales increased by 17.5%, boosted by government subsidies and tax cuts on purchases of cars and appliances. This sounds miraculous, especially when compared to doom laden predictions of year or so ago, with negative growth and mass social unrest viewed as a genuine perspective for China. The ruling bureaucracy of the Chinese Communist Party were slightly smarter than the Western economists whose models have long been proven to be defunct. A massive stimulus package, made all the more effective by the network of state investment banks and state owned infrastructure firms, allowed the Chinese political economy to avoid falling over the cliff. However, this cannot continue indefinitely given the stagnant growth in the Euro-zone and the North American market, together responsible for 70% of Chinese exports, which are themselves responsible for 50% of Chinese GDP. The Chinese economy’s slack is shrinking fast, raising the likelihood of a new crisis of overproduction. The massive expansion of money and credit over the past year could quickly spill into inflation, as it has recently done in Britain-the natural result of massive quantitative easing in a stagnant World economy. The growth in bank credit slowed to 32% in the year to December, but that is still far too fast. The central bank has started to drain liquidity by lifting banks’ reserve requirements, and some banks have been told to reduce their lending.(2) With China slowing once again, the outlook for UK banks which extort large portions of their earnings from Chinese investments, begins to look shaky.

Despite this unstable and diseased outlook, most business leaders, bankers and think tank cronies are calling for a massive reduction in the state budget, tax rises and a return to business as usual. The only thing the ruling class are united on is that workers will pay for a crisis not of their making. As Nouriel Roubini stated on Monday: "For a start, there are risks associated with exit strategies from the massive monetary and fiscal easing: policymakers are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they take large fiscal deficits seriously and raise taxes, cut spending and mop up excess liquidity soon, they would undermine recovery and tip the economy back into stag-deflation (recession and deflation)...But if they maintain large budget deficits, bond market vigilantes will punish policymakers. Then, inflationary expectations will increase, long-term government bond yields would rise and borrowing rates will go up sharply, leading to stagflation."(3)

Both main parties are lining up to voice their commitment to stand 'strong' and attack the poorest sections of the working classes who use the services they plan to cut. There is absolutely no evidence that Labour are going be nicer than the Tories, especially given how craven the trade union leaders have been in defending their poorer members and the wider class. If the union leaders who now effectively run the Labour Party and fund it almost in total are not going to fight for a pro worker manifesto before the election, i.e. when they have the leverage, why would they be expected to do so after an election, when the refrain from the Parliamentary Labour Party will be: 'look, we are the only party with a hope of winning the next election and defeating the Tories. Don't mess things up with calls for working class reforms', the language of Blair and Brown after 1994.

We need urgently to convene local, regional and national committees of action-based around the Unemployed Workers Union-to prepare to fight back and support workers and unemployed who are fighting against being made to pay for the bosses crisis. This would also be a good forum in which to discuss how we fightback politically.

(1) http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c9524704-180e-11df-91d2-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1

(2) http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15327942

(3) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/recession/6080523/Nouriel-Roubini-warns-threat-of-double-dip-recession-is-rising.html

Taliban still gonna win

2010-02-16T03:53:00.000-08:00

In a move aimed to pacify US government moaning concerning Pakistan military support for the Taliban, the top Taliban commander to date has been arrested by the Pakistan army, inside Pakistan. Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar was captured in Karachi, South Pakistan, and is apparently 'talking to his interrogators'. The sense of relief in the Imperialist press is palpable, finally 'good news' to report coming as it does after 2009s litany of disasters for the Imperialists, with the Taliban taking control of 80% of Afghanistan, including parts of the capital, Kabul. The capture is also vital to the morale of the troops sent to kill the workers and farmers in Afghanistan on behalf of British and US Imperialism: must be hard to keep fighting when there are only casualties and defeats on your side.

2009 was the deadliest year so far for the occupiers, with over 500 troops dead and thousands more injured. The capture of such a prima facie commander ,second only to Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar in rank, will no doubt be trotted out time and again as evidence that the back of the resistance has been broken. Reality will of course intrude in the form of yet more stunning victories for the anti-Imperialist resistance, already able to boast of recapturing areas of Helmand Province formally held by British troops. Soldiers sardonically refer to their operations as ‘mowing the lawn’ because the anti-occupation forces simply retreat and return. According to the New York Times, Obama will be sending a further 34,000 troops to Afghanistan. 34,000 US troops would mean Obama has more or less come down on the side of General McChrystal, US commander in Afghanistan. McChrystal, an expert in undercover assassination operations, wants an extra 40,000 troops to wage a counter-insurgency campaign to ‘clear, hold and build’ small strategic areas that could then spread and join to create larger areas under their control. Bribery is integral to the spread. It is this system which simply will not work. The local satraps employed by Obama and Co. become hated; the local Taliban (the Taliban has little national structure, being more a loose alliance of resistance groups) begin to look like the only anti occupation game in town; the Imperialists and their flunkey's are forced out of areas they previously shed much blood, most of it Afghan civilian, in capturing.

The capture of one leader of what is a multifarious and grass roots resistance means zip in the grand scheme of the war, almost a decade old now. The Taliban have reconquered the land they lost up to 2007. They are now seen, rightly, as the only force which has consistently fought the occupation. The expulsion of the US from Afghanistan will give a tremendous fillip to the poor peoples of the world, much like the defeat in Vietnam emboldened the anti-colonial movements of Africa and Latin America. The chant of all consistent anti Imperialists and Marxists should be: VICTORY TO THE TALIBAN!

SWP tells us to vote for imperialism, war, racism and repression

2010-02-13T13:19:00.000-08:00

originally published by the Revolutionary Communist Group. click title for link to original

Let us be absolutely clear. A vote for Labour is:

a vote for British imperialism and the City of London.
a vote for more wars.
a vote for state racism: attacks on asylum seekers and immigrants, racist policing and racism in prisons.
a vote for more repressive laws to add to the legion the Labour Government has passed since 1997. a vote for more privatisation of the NHS and education at the expense of the quality of provision for working class people and for savage cuts in public spending.

Yet the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), which has the nerve to call itself revolutionary, is telling us to vote Labour at the forthcoming general election. Socialist Worker (13 February 2010) reports that the SWP’s National Committee has agreed that ‘we will…vote Labour against the Tories where there is no serious left of Labour candidate.’

The article itself is an exercise in empty sophistry. We are supposed to vote Labour because it ‘came into being to represent trade union leaders in Parliament.’ And so, in a period where trade union leaders have blocked any serious resistance to Labour attacks on the working class, we are asked to support their parliamentary representation! Why? Apparently because Labour is ‘a break from the idea that everything is best left to our “betters”.’ On the one hand there is an ‘idea’, on the other hand, the reality of Labour’s attacks on the working class and oppressed – and the SWP thinks the ‘idea’ is more important! Even worse, Socialist Worker adds to its justification by saying that Labour leaders ‘can exercise influence only by making at least some verbal concessions to working class connections.’ How easily pleased the SWP wants us to be!

Socialist Worker, putting on a radical face, quotes from a speech by Lenin in 1920 (Collected Works Vol 31 pp 257-63) where he describes the Labour Party as a ‘thoroughly bourgeois party.’ However, the article does not quote anything from later on in the talk where Lenin puts this characterisation firmly in the context of his position on imperialism, parasitism and the labour aristocracy, a context the SWP has always rejected. Instead, in a sleight of hand, Socialist Worker asserts that Lenin also describes the Labour Party as a ‘bourgeois workers’ party’ and concludes that ‘the party remains essentially the same’ today. This is utter nonsense. In 1920, communists and their organisations could be members of the Labour Party, which in Lenin’s words, ‘allows sufficient liberty to all the political parties affiliated to it.’ This was before bans and proscriptions on communists, before the General Strike, before the Labour Party had formed any government. To argue that the Labour Party is ‘essentially’ the same after 90 years of reaction is absurd. The thought that Lenin would today call for a vote for Labour is laughable, and it is intellectually dishonest to cherry-pick his views to justify a reactionary standpoint.

The article tells us that the ‘proportion of manual and routine white collar workers in the Labour Party has also fallen’ but that ‘this has not transformed the nature of the party.’ This mealy-mouthed statement is intended to cover up the reality that there are hardly any such members, and that already in 1987, over 20 years ago, an internal Labour Party report concluded that 60% of Labour’s members had a degree or equivalent. Labour Party membership is middle class through and through.

Scratching around desperately for further arguments to support Labour, the article tells us that ‘many workers will feel depressed and less confident to fight’ if the Tories win. This cod psychology is at variance with its earlier declaration that ‘Millions of workers are to the left of all the main parties over such issues as privatisation, ending the war in Afghanistan and making the rich pay for the economic crisis.’ So what the SWP wants to do is to drag these millions of workers to the right, to participate in an electoral fraud where what is on offer is a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. No, the instincts of those workers which might lead them boycott Labour and organise a movement against it are absolutely correct and should be encouraged and supported by honest socialists.

The truth is that there is no crime that Labour can commit which will stop the SWP from supporting it. And the SWP is not alone: virtually all the rest of the spineless British left will be calling for a Labour vote in one way, shape or form:

The recently-formed Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) recognises ‘that there will be Labour and non-Labour candidates who agree with our policies, who share our socialist aspirations and who will be supported by left and labour movement organisations participating in our coalition.’
The Respect Party at its November 2009 conference agreed that ‘The election of a Tory government would be a further setback for those who want to see a fairer Britain…Where there are good Labour MPs who deserve this support, we will back them.’
The Communist Party of Britain says it ‘will also support some other left-wing candidates standing against new Labour types while stressing its overall preference for a Labour victory over the Tories.’ It emphasises that ‘it is vital to ensure that the small number of socialists already in Parliament are backed in their re-election campaigns.’ (Morning Star, 22 January 2010)
After 13 years of Labour government war, racism and oppression, there is not a single socialist remaining in the Labour Party let alone MP or parliamentary candidate. Anyone with an ounce of integrity would have resigned long ago. Those who remain do so because they do not wish to lose their privileged position. Whatever they claim, they are part of the problem, a problem which the TUSC, Respect, CPB and SWP then compound by fostering the illusion that they really are on our side. These left groupings will not advocate a complete break with Labour, they will not mention the imperialist and parasitic character of British capitalism, they are opportunist and reactionary. Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! will not be part of this deceit. We will campaign on the streets against a vote for Labour, and call for the building of anti-imperialist opposition.

Don’t vote, organise!

Yet more scandals from the Eco-mentalists

2010-02-07T08:17:00.000-08:00

More Scandals Implicate IPCC Climate Scientists
author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order
by F. William Engdahl
January 22, 2010

click title for original

Only days after the failed Copenhagen Global Warming Summit, yet a new scandal over the scientific accuracy of the UN IPCC 2007 climate report has emerged. Following the major data-manipulation scandals from the UN-tied research center at Britain’s East Anglia University late 2009, the picture emerges of one of the most massive scientific frauds of recent history.

Senior members of the UN climate project, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have been forced to admit a major error in the 2007 IPCC UN report that triggered the recent global campaign for urgent measures to reduce “manmade emissions” of CO2. The IPCC’s 2007 report stated, “glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world.” Given that this is the world’s highest mountain range and meltdown implies a massive flooding of India, China and the entire Asian region, it was a major scare “selling point” for the IPCC agenda. As well, the statement on the glacier melt in the 2007 IPCC report contains other serious errors such as the statement that “Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by the year 2035." There are only 33,000 square kilometers of glaciers in the Himalayas. And a table in the report says that between 1845 and 1965, the Pindari Glacier shrank by 2,840 meters. Then comes a math mistake: It says that's a rate of 135.2 meters a year, when it really is only 23.5 meters a year. Now scientists around the world are scouring the entire IPCC report for indications of similar lack of scientific rigor.

It emerges that the basis of the stark IPCC glacier meltdown statement of 2007 was not even a scientific study of melting data. Rather it was a reference to a newspaper article cited by a pro-global warming ecological advocacy group, WWF.

The original source of the IPCC statement, it turns out, appeared in a 1999 report in the British magazine, New Scientist that was cited in passing by WWF. The New Scientist author, Fred Pierce, wrote then, “The inclusion of this statement has angered many glaciologists, who regard it as unjustified. Vijay Raina, a leading Indian glaciologist, wrote in a paper published by the Indian Government in November that there is no sign of "abnormal" retreat in Himalayan glaciers. India's environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, accused the IPCC of being "alarmist." The IPCC's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, has hit back, denouncing the Indian government report as "voodoo science" lacking peer review. He adds that "we have a very clear idea of what is happening" in the Himalayas.” 1

The same Pachauri, co-awardee of the Nobel Prize with Al Gore, has recently been under attack for huge conflicts of interest related to his business interests that profit from the CO2 global warming agenda he promotes.2

Pearce notes that the original claim made by Indian glaciologist Syed Hasnain, in a 1999 email interview with Pearce, namely that all the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas could disappear by 2035, never was repeated by Hasnain in any peer-reviewed scientific journal, and that Hasnain now says the remark was "speculative".

Despite that lack of scientific validation the 10-year-old claim ended up in the IPCC fourth assessment report published in 2007. Moreover the claim was extrapolated to include all glaciers in the Himalayas.

Since publication of the latest New Scientist article, the IPCC officially has been forced to issue the following statement: “the IPCC said the paragraph "refers to poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly."

The IPCC adds, "The IPCC regrets the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures in this instance." But the statement calls for no action beyond stating a need for absolute adherence to IPCC quality control processes. "We reaffirm our strong commitment to ensuring this level of performance," the statement said.” 3

In an indication of the defensiveness prevailing within the UN’s IPCC, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice-chair of the IPCC, insists that the mistake did nothing to undermine the large body of evidence that showed the climate was warming and that human activity was largely to blame. He told BBC News: "I don't see how one mistake in a 3,000-page report can damage the credibility of the overall report."

Some serious scientists disagree. Georg Kaser, an expert in glaciology with University of Innsbruck in Austria and a lead author for the IPCC, gave a damning different assessment of the implications of the latest scandal affecting the credibility of the IPCC. Kaser says he had warned that the 2035 prediction was clearly wrong in 2006, months before the IPCC report was published. "This [date] is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude. All the responsible people are aware of this weakness in the fourth assessment. All are aware of the mistakes made. If it had not been the focus of so much public opinion, we would have said 'we will do better next time'. It is clear now that working group II has to be restructured." 4

The chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, has made no personal comment on the glacier claim. It appears he is as well shaken by the wave of recent scandals. He told a conference in Dubai on energy recently, "They can't attack the science so they attack the chairman. But they won't sink me. I am the unsinkable Molly Brown (sic). In fact, I will float much higher," he told the Guardian. His remarks suggest more the ‘spirit of Woodstock’ in 1969 than of what is supposed to be the world’s leading climate authority.

Resources

1 Fred Pearce, Debate heats up over IPCC melting glaciers claim, 11 January 2010, accessed in http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18363-debate-heats-up-over-ipcc-melting-glaciers-claim.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news.

2 F. William Engdahl, UN IPCC Climate Change chief in Conflict of Interest Scandal, December 27, 2009.

3 Seth Borenstein, UN climate report riddled with errors on glaciers, AP, January 20, 2010.

4 Ibid.

Copyright © 2010 F. William Engdahl
Editorial Archive

Do we have an aristocracy of labour? and what do we do about it?

2010-02-07T05:53:00.000-08:00

The Following blog post is a debate thread concerning whether or not trade unionists in Imperialist countries such as Britain represent an aristocratic and privileged sector of the global working class. Flowing naturally from this is what would this mean for political strategy and tactics for world revolution. The thread is posted (amended to remove repetition by different posters) as it does reveal the rejection of Marx and Engels position on the labour aristocracy, not to mention the position of Lenin in his classic works of the First World War period, see:

"To adopt, as some on the left do, a headline slogan like ‘asylum seekers welcome here’ is a mistake. It will never gain the ear of the vast majority of working-class people in Britain."-Hannah Sell, Socialist Party Deputy General Secretary, http://www.socialismtoday.org/79/asylum.html

This blogger adds:

"AT THE SAME time, it is necessary to work out a more detailed programme in individual communities where there has been a sudden influx of asylum seekers. We always fight to prevent working-class communities having to suffer further over-stretching of limited services. Government policy means that this is the effect of the sudden arrival of new asylum seekers. We have to call for community campaigns to secure extra resources – more teachers, doctors, language support and so on – in some cases, even as a precondition to the arrival of new groups of asylum seekers. In doing so we should always strive to build a united campaign of asylum seekers and local communities."-Hannah Sell, ibid

So a leading Marxist calls for working class communities to make extra funding the basis for allowing refugees to settle-not a united struggle, buit an exclusionist struggle.

'The Socialist Party-translating the method of Marxism into the chauvinism of the better off sections of an Imperialist states working class'-new banner headline for demos?

Steve Revins of Socialist Fight added:

Hannah Sell is "a leading Marxist"? huh i guess she is a leader of the SP and she does "speak for them"....
I agree with what you say here, but have to 'take issue' a bit with this "better off sections of an Imperialist states working class": actually everyone in Britain as every other imperialist State is MUCH "better off" than the majority of the world's population (the majority of which is now for a few years proletarians rather than peasants).
you know 1bil of the 6bil population are currently dying from malnutrition and/or lack of basic things like clean water.....

in an imperialist state, as elsewhere, a worker is exploited and oppressed: as a worker, producing value.... you know about that!
my theory is that the German car-workers, altho higher-paid than the British, are MORE EXPLOITED because they produce more value: so are robbed of more.....
but that theory easily lends itself to 'nationalisms'....i am just trying to get to the bottom of what You are saying, Chris: is it that in some way the "better-off" strata or sections or whatever - it's real people we are talking about, and perhaps i am one of them!.....
that these workers are in some way responsible?

I would definitely say that their position as 'direct' slaves of the imperialists, "at home" means that they have a 'special' responsibilITY, because it's quite obvious that the Revolution has to be in the advanced parts of the world, ie the imperialist countries.
of course i am completely UN-judgemental about the word "advanced"!

Gerry Downing, also of Socialist Fight added:

they (depoendent countries) are objectively unable to do more than slightly alter their terms of trade with world imperialism led by the US, no matter how heroic their revolution. And I speak here of Castro and Chavez and the like who make/made some improvement in response to pressure from below, many of the bourgeois nationalists like Mandela and Lula don’t even do that. But, as has been asserted by Steve, we must kill the beast at its head and to do that we need the metropolitan working class, which does constantly renew itself through immigration and capitalist crisis will always return the revolution here to the agenda. We just have to find out and practice revolutionary intervention and provide revolutionary leadership here or the one billion starving will never have a hope of getting fed

This blogger responded:

No, the bulk of workers do not have the same complicity in the super exploitation of workers abroad as the skilled sections of the working class. Just a few facts and a few figures. The % of workers earning the minimum wage who are unionised is 16%. The 19% of those earning £500-999 is 40%, and the % of those earning over £999 is 20 %. These figures reveal quite starkly just who the trade unionised working class is, and why they are such a conservative and reactionary force on the whole. It is not the case that they are never changing, for example the aristocracy used to be steel workers and miners, these industries died a death and those sections were smashed. The stability of an Imperialist state requires a layer of workers to act as the watch guard of the working class generally. The aristocracy of labour today is perhaps the best kind of aristocracy, with 48% of trade unionists having degrees or equivalents, and the likelihood of you becoming a trade unionist rising as you become a manager or above. Where do the bloated salaries of train drivers or teachers come from? They do not come from any kind of extra value produced by these sectors, no, they come from the subsidy-direct in the case of Rail-appropriated from the Imperialist sections of the bourgeoisie through state taxation. The fact that there is still class conflict means very little, viewed from a context of this struggle being one of how best to redivide the very real exploitation of workers abroad.

Do all workers benefit in some way through Imperialism (remember, the Brit bosses have 5XGDP abroad)? No. Those workers who are indigenous/well settled and have access to things such as the state benefits system, the education and health systems etc do benefit slightly from the super exploitation of our international brothers and sisters-the fact that they do this as unorganised, very low paid workers counters any real benefits they may gain. Those who have the skill premiums and are considered and consider themselves as stable workers suitable for organisation and class collaboration do very well out of Imperialism. It is this layer who do best out of the welfare state, a system ostensibly meant to protect and assist the poorest sections of society the most. A report from Civitas exposed the middle class (which many of the top layers of the trade unions would fall into) benefit most from the NHS and other welfare services. The report argued: 'The government is faced with the dispiriting fact that not only have health inequalities not improved, but they have got worse… Not only are lower socio-economic groups less healthy, but the relative gap is growing … it is becoming increasingly clear that the NHS often does little to combat inequality-and may even make it worse, by providing an inequitable service.' (p.80) http://www.roadtothemiddleclass.com/blog1423_middle_class_benefit_most_from_welfare_state.html

How else do we explain how much worse off workers in the colonial countries are than the better off layers here? The level of struggle? no, if struggle determined living standards then the Indian working class would be living it large. We can explain it only through the prism of a bribed and corrupted top layer of the class, organised in trade unions, collaborating in the exploitation of workers and poor people abroad.

The types of jobs that trade unionists do reflects their higher levels of qualification. 42.1% of trade unionists are now professionals or associate professionals, compared to 26.7% for the working population as a whole and 20.6% who are non-members. In 2005, a mere 8.8% of trade unionists were Process, Plant and Machine operatives. Most tellingly, in 1991, 34% of trade union members were either managers, professional or associate professionals; by 1995 this had risen to 41%. Now, 51.5% of trade unionists fall into these three categories. The more highly skilled the job, the more likely you are to be a trade unionist. You are also more likely to be a trade unionist if you have worked at a place for ten yrs or more like 47% of trade unionists, despite less than one third of workers generally being in that situation of tenure. One third of trade unionists earn in the minimum wage - £499 category, and it is clear from the sort of jobs being attacked through the economic crisis that it is this layer who struggle in a crisis: postal workers, bin men, care workers have all been forced to fight the bosses crisis, although without out much in the way of official leadership or support. Why is this? and why do the lower paid trade unionists, those on the minimum wage like the heroic female and Asian workers at Gate Gourmet get shafted so readily when push comes to shove? because these workers and jobs are transitory, always being destroyed and replaced by similar jobs and grades by the destructive process of capital accumulation. The unions are dominated by the much higher paid and by the much more secure. How else to explain the support for the bureaucracy in the unions for so long? People can either be considered stupid, but even then only for some of the time. The harsh reality of unions being dominated by their top halfs, and as a consequence having no issue with sell outs of the lower paid, the wider class or the counter reformism of the Labour Party. This has even been displayed very recently in the RMT, where we have the leader looking at an old Labour alliance for the elections, whilst the bulk of the membership and the executive could not give a flying f*** and as a result Crow is forced to back the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition an individual.

What to do? well, the fact of trade unions only organising half of the better off third of workers effectively, makes inroads to the bottom third and the unorganised mass of workers, especially the worst off agency/temp and migrant workers all the easier. To organise these layers as a battering ram against the conservative wrecking influence of the current unions is THE task of tasks facing revolutionary communists in the union movement. We will no doubt find allies amongst some layers who are being forced down into the ranks of the low paid, as the most oppressed sections of the class found allies in the heroic miners of 1984-5. The great miners strike was a textbook example of how a section of workers previously very well paid as a result of struggles, remember, before the 1970s the miners were only averagely paid compared to the skilled workers, can become a target for the bosses. It took bringing down a government to secure greater subsidy and henceforth higher wages-wages which came from British capital being able to use some of the loot from abroad to buy a relative social peace at home. This situation could not last. The strike of 1984-5 was essentially about destroying the power of this old section of the class. The rest of the union movement, including the skilled sections of the trade unions, scabbed on the miners. The trade union and Labour Party leaders isolated and abused Scargill as a Dinosaur, which of course he was-out of date for seeking to defend an industry and trade union ear marked for obsolescence by British bosses. This is how the aristocracy and their leadership operate-isolate the fighting sections of the class, wreck their struggles and make clear that fighting comes at a very heavy cost.

Do workers and the oppressed in the bulk of the World need to wait until the labour aristocracy in Britain has somehow committed harikari and become revolutionary?-Let us hope not.

Watchdogs of Capitalism: The reality of the labour aristocracy

2010-02-03T03:45:00.000-08:00

Below are three articles originally published by the Revolutionary Communist Group, clicking the title will take you to the originals. I have reproduced these pieces due to their very high quality, appositeness and for the nuanced and accomplished understanding of the dialectic of party and class, that is; how do we create the space for the revolutionary struggle of the working class to unite with the revolutionary communist party? This is the question of questions facing us today. It will be obvious after reviewing these articles that the basis for this dual process is the capture and renewal of working class organisation from the 'labour Lieutenants of capital'.

from Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 115, October/November 1993
Haunted by the Labour Aristocracy
Part 1: Marx and Engels on the split in the working class

The SWP is obsessed by the concept of the labour aristocracy. Every few months without fail, an article appears in Socialist Worker, Socialist Review or International Socialism, always with the same refrain: there is no such thing as a labour aristocracy, nor has there ever been any kind of privileged stratum of the working class, especially one whose privileges were dependent on the survival of imperialism. ROBERT CLOUGH analyses the latest attempt to revise this theory. Part One examines whether Marx and Engels had a theory of the labour aristocracy.
The latest article by Corr and Brown in International Socialism (Issue No 59, Summer 1993, pp37-74) is a lazy, frequently dishonest production. The tone is set in the introduction, where they condemn a well-known writer on imperialism, Arghiri Emmanuel, for postulating 'a fundamental asymmetry in the system - in one area high wages and low profits, in the other low wages and high profits.' (p38) Their comment? 'This comes very close to the purely national division of the world into "proletarian" and "bourgeois" nations.' To more normal people, it comes 'very close' to Lenin's description of the 'essence of imperialism' - the division between oppressor and oppressed nations.

As we shall see, what is really at issue in the argument is indeed the existence and nature of imperialism, and that far from undermining the concept of the revolutionary role of the working class as the SWP argues, recognising and understanding the concept of the labour aristocracy is critical to re-affirming that revolutionary role. Hence we are not debating some abstract historical point. Bourgeois democracy depends on capitalism's ability to recruit a section of the working class to its side. But not just any section: it must be a stratum which controls the principal organisations of the working class, and which can constantly exclude any revolutionary element from these organisations - that is, act as the 'labour lieutenants of capital'. To win and retain the allegiance of this section, capitalism must be able to offer it a relatively privileged position, to give it a stake in capitalism's survival. The stratum is not fixed: its composition will change according to capitalism's development. Over the last hundred years (150 in the case of Britain), the fate of this stratum or labour aristocracy has been tied up with that of imperialism. Its form has changed: a hundred years ago, it was made up of skilled manual workers, whether in Britain, the US or Germany. Now it is more made up of white collar workers in the higher echelons of the public and service sectors. But without its support, imperialism could not maintain its democratic facade. In conditions where this privileged layer has proved incapable of controlling the organisations of the working class, or where imperialism has been unable to sustain it to any degree, the ruling class has had to resort to military or fascist rule,

In contrast, the struggle of revolutionaries and communists is to drive this privileged stratum from its positions of control, to isolate it from the rest of the working class. Without this political and ideological struggle, there can be no prospect of socialism. We can begin to see already the close connection between the SWP's rejection of the concept of the labour aristocracy, and a political practice which involves building an alliance with the left wing of this privileged stratum, particularly the left of the Labour Party. Hence Corr and Brown are not just discussing history: they are defending the political practice of the SWP. As we shall see later, their attack on Lenin in particular serves as a justification for their uncritical alliance with the left of the Labour Party on any issue to do with British imperialist foreign policy - be it Ireland, the Falklands or the Gulf War.

However, Corr and Brown have a major problem: that every contemporary political commentator on the phenomenon of the classic, late nineteenth century labour aristocracy not only recognised its existence, but usually predicated part of their political activity on either fostering it (The Liberal Party, Disraeli), organising it (the New Model Trade Unions), or fighting its bankrupt political standpoint (the revolutionaries). The existence of a privileged stratum of the British working class, overwhelmingly its skilled section in this period, was taken for granted in every political circle in the second half of the nineteenth century. In fact, the only people who have questioned it have done so at a distance of at least half a century, and are eithervirulent anti-communists (in particular Professor Seton-Watson who really started this hare running in 1953), bourgeois labour historians who deny the existence of classes let alone strata within classes (such as H Pelling), other modern labour historians who have a vested interest in playing down the significance of privilege (such as Stedman Jones), or the SWP. There is not a single authority within the revolutionary movement either now or at any stage in the past century who contested the issue; as materialists, they liked to deal with real phenomena rather than conjure them out of existence.

So how do our authors perform their own conjuring tricks? Selective quotation, sleight of hand, innuendo, a vast amount of ignorance, in other words, by using all the normal tools of the bourgeois academic trade. They start with Marx; so shall we.

Did Marx have a theory of the labour aristocracy?

Yes he did, whatever our authors say. Their view is that when he referred explicitly to its existence, it was in a 'descriptive' not 'analytic' manner (p41), or he used the term to refer to the trade union leaders, not to the privileged workers they led in the late nineteenth century. In particular, they say that whenever Marx made reference to the bribery of this upper stratum, 'the form of that bribery was left vague' (p42). However, it was quite overt. Marx worked alongside English trade union leaders in the Workingmen's International in the 1860s. The International was the prime force behind the formation of the Reform League in 1865, which agitated for universal male suffrage and a secret ballot. Its committee of twelve consisted of six workers and six middle class reformists.

Despite Marx's efforts, the workers soon adapted to the standpoint of the middle class reformists. The League started to receive considerable finance from far-sighted capitalists, and in particular leading Liberal politicians. As a result, the League qualified its demand for male suffrage with the phrase 'registered and residential'. This property qualification would exclude the mass of unskilled and casual workers. Marx condemned the manoeuvres of these working class leaders for the compromises they made. In 1868, it was the Tory Disraeli who 'dished the Whigs' by granting the extension of the suffrage to include about one in five workers; this respectable upper stratum had proved themselves worthy of this right, one which the ruling class was sure they would exercise with moderation. Later, in the 1868 general election, working class leaders were paid election expenses and £10 a head to canvass for the Liberals - a very direct bribe in any terms. Hence Marx's comment on one Barry 'that he is not one of the so-called leaders of the English workers, since these men are more or less bribed by the bourgeoisie and the government.' (Minutes and Documents of the Hague Congress of the International, p124)

Marx's experience in the First International was one of continuous struggle against the English trade union leaders, firstly on the Irish question and the defence of Fenian prisoners, and secondly in defence of the Paris Commune. Corr and Brown say that when Marx addressed the London Congress of the First International in 1871 and 'made reference to the unions as "an aristocratic minority" with most workers outside them, (he) again seemed to use the term in a general descriptive sense' (p42). They clearly have not read what he said, which completely undermines their position:

'The Trades Unions are an aristocratic minority - the poor workers cannot belong to them: the great mass of workers whom economic development is driving from the countryside into the towns every day has long been outside the trades unions - and the most wretched mass has never belonged; the same goes for the workers born in the East End in London; one in 10 belongs to Trades Unions - peasants, day labourers never belong to these societies.
The Trades Unions can do nothing by themselves - they will remain a minority - they have no power over the mass of proletarians.' (Minutes of the London Congress of the International, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol 22, p614)

This conclusion was drawn from the experience of nearly a decade of struggle, through which the unions had shown their complete contempt for the most oppressed sections of the working class, both at home and abroad. To suggest that he was using the term 'descriptively' is utter nonsense. It was these trade union leaders who attempted to get a motion of censure on Marx in the International in 1872 for saying that the English labour leaders had sold themselves 'to Gladstone, Morley, Duke and others' (Minutes and Documents of the Hague Congress of the International, p702). Those nineteenth century union leaders hada better understanding of Marx's threat to their position than do twentieth century academics.

Did Engels develop Marx's position?

Yes, he did, and in discussion with Marx too. Our two authors aren't quite clear on this; on the one hand, they say 'Like Marx, Engels began to detect the emergence of labour aristocracy in the early 1850s' (p43), on the other, they refer to the 'somewhat ambiguous ideas sketched by Marx and especially by Engels' (p46). But there is nothing ambiguous in his description in 1885 of the situation between 1850 and 1870, when be writes that 'A permanent improvement can be recognised for two "protected" sections only of the working class.' The first section are factory workers protected by limits on the working day, and:

'Secondly, the great Trade Unions. They are the organisations of those trades in which the labour of grown-up men (his emphasis) predominates, or is alone applicable. Here the competition neither of women or children nor of machinery has so far weakened their organised strength. The engineers, the carpenters and joiners, the bricklayers are each of them a power to the extent that as in the case of the bricklayers and bricklayers' labourers, they can even successfully resist the introduction of machinery... They form an aristocracy among the working class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final. They are the model workingmen of Messrs Leone Levi and Giffen, and they are very nice people nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in particular and for the whole capitalist class in general.
But as to the great mass of the working people, the state of misery and insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever, if not lower.' (In Marx and Engels: Articles on Britain, pp378-9)

What is the conclusion of our authors after they quote part of this passage? 'But what Engels seemed to make was a close identification of "aristocrats" with bureaucrats', continuing: 'Later writers specifically refused to identify "aristocrats" with "leaders", the whole point being to shift the focus onto a layer of workers' (their emphasis, p44). Who are they trying to kid? In fact they are so poorly researched that when they go on to say that Engels' 1892 Preface to The Condition of the Working Class in England was 'Engels' fullest denunciation of the "aristocracy among the working class" - a "small, privileged protected minority" steeped in "respectable bourgeois prejudices" and "permanently benefited" by the proceeds of empire' (p44), they do not realise he is quoting a large chunk of his 1885 article. They themselves have not read the Preface - only Lenin's citations from it! This is not a trivial point; it exposes the bogus erudition of the article - it is no more than cod academicism.

For Engels, the aristocracy are the skilled sections of the working class organised in their New Model Unions. So when Corr and Brown argue 'It is still hard to pin down exactly who the labour aristocrats were for Engels' (p45) we can only conclude it is hard for them to understand anything. Already in the 1850s Engels and Marx were discussing the corruption of the English working class movement and connecting it to England's industrial monopoly. As Engels said in a letter to Marx in 1858: '..the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois... For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.' (Marx and Engels: Selected Correspondence, p132). For those who would like to draw a distinction between Marx and Engels' alleged 'crudities', it is noteworthy that Marx never once contradicted Engels in his development of the position.

Our authors concede this, but then say 'there is no description or explanation of the mechanism by which the bribery works' (p43), and repeal the point elsewhere (eg p42, p45). That the bribes or privileges existed there is of course no doubt.

What were the privileges?

The labour aristocracy's privileges were both economic and political. Economically, their jobs were far more assured than those of unskilled workers; typically their unemployment rates were half or one third those of unskilled workers. Their wages were much higher - some 40 shillings per week at a time when theunskilled worker earned 20 to 25 shillings. They tended to live apart from the mass of the working class, socially and geographically. Their children had access to education. With higher wages came better food, better health and a longer life.

The political privileges were equally significant: the vote being one. The 1868 Reform Act with its property qualifications consolidated the developing aristocracy of labour by allowing it to participate in the bourgeois democratic process. This is not considered at all by our authors, although they speak for an organisation whose desire to vote Labour at every possible opportunity is remarkable if only for its single-mindedness. Yet this was the point at which the leaders of this aristocratic minority, aided by the most direct of bribes, sacrificed the interests of the mass of the working class for those of its privileged section, and became no more than an appendage to the Liberals.

Another political concession that came with increasing respectability was the legalisation of trade union organisation. However, the New Model Unions embraced only the skilled sections of the working class, and quite deliberately excluded the unskilled, through apprenticeships and restrictions on the number of labourers they might supervise. Corr and Brown, in defending these unions, argue that 'Nevertheless, it is one thing to forsake revolutionary class struggle but quite another to accept the philosophy of capitalism. The craftist unions clearly did not do this' (p60). Well, they appear to be alone in this judgement. Applegarth, leader of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and a member of the notorious London Junta, wrote in 1866:

'Let us then unite with dignified firmness and rest not until our unions have that protection to which they are entitled, and I trust that with such protection and a few more years' experience, we shall have established a new era in the history of labour, have gained the full confidence of our employers, adopted arbitration as the first resort of our differences, and freed our unions from the expense and anxiety of strikes as far as it is possible to do so...' (Quoted in T. Rothstein: From Chartism to Labourism, p186)
Now this would seem to be very much an 'acceptance of the philosophy of capitalism'; indeed, if a movement forsakes revolutionary struggle, it can do no other. Even Francis Williams, the official historian of the Labour Party some 45 years ago, is quite clear on the moderation of the skilled unions; discussing their role in the formation of the London Trades Council in 1860, he wrote:

'What was no less important was that they understood the middle-class point of view -- the point of view of those who in increasing measure now formed public opinion -- because they shared it. Their modest ambition indeed was to establish a new group within that wide amorphous class, raising the skilled workers whom they represented to a position totally divorced from that of the struggling mass below.' (F. Williams: Magnificent Journey - The Rise of the Trade Unions, p105)
Later on, Williams cites the opposition of the skilled unions to the eight- hour day in the 1880s as an example of their 'cautious, conciliatory and self-satisfied' attitude (Magnificent Journey, p162). Corr and Brown ignore this, although perhaps more than any other question it showed how opposed the craft unions were to the interests of the mass of the working class. On the one hand there were the socialists, including Tom Mann, demanding legislation for the eight hour day. On the other stood the craft unions, opposing any state intervention on the question, arguing that it was a matter of negotiation with the employers. Given that they were the only negotiating bodies, it was tantamount to saying only skilled workers could have the eight-hour day. Engels was in the thick of this struggle, and when under the influence of the new unskilled unions, the old gang of the skilled unions were defeated at the 1891 TUC, he spoke enthusiastically of the defeat of the 'bourgeois labour party':

'The old unions, with the textile workers at their head, and the whole of the reactionary party among the workers, had exerted all their strength towards overthrowing the eight-hour decision of 1890. They came to grief ... and the bourgeois papers recognised the defeat of the bourgeois labour party.' (Engels, Letter to Sorge, 14 September 1891)
Perhaps Engels was mistaken about their 'acceptance of the philosophy of capitalism'? Certainly Corr and Brown seem completely unaware of the major political battles of the time, when Tom Mann argued:

'New unionism must be judged by its fruits. Many identified with it had long been membersof their own societies and had grieved bitterly over the workers' poverty, particularly that of the unskilled and unorganised, and at the callous disregard shown by the old societies, even for the labourers in their own trade. The old school had proved unable to organise the unskilled and even to further their own interests.' (Quoted in Dona Torr: Tom Mann ond His Times, p18)
What was the source of these privileges?

We have already shown how Engels and Marx attributed the privileged existence of the labour aristocracy to England's industrial monopoly in the 1850s and 1860s, augmented by its colonial monopoly, especially during the period of relative industrial decline from the 1870s onward. When Corr and Brown cite Gareth Stedman Jones (who has accomplished his own personal revolution, become a professor and renounced both Marxism and the class struggle) in arguing that in Engels 'there was no definitive material theory of the labour aristocracy' (p45), it was certainly true that they produced no academic treatise on the matter. But Engels made pointed reference to England's monopoly position, as Corr and Brown concede earlier on in their article when they say that Engels was 'categorical' about the 'link between England's colonial monopoly and the corruption of a certain layer of the working class' (p43).

The liberal JA Hobson also made this connection at the turn of the century, and Lenin argued that by doing so, he showed himself more advanced than the so-called Marxist Kautsky. We would say that he was more advanced than Corr and Brown writing nearly a hundred years later. If we look at the sectors where skilled workers and their organisation were strongest, we find them to be closely connected to Empire: textiles, iron and steel, engineering, and coal. Textiles because of the cheap cotton from Egypt, and a captive market in India; iron and steel because of ship- building and railway exports, engineering because of the imperialist arms industry, and coal because of the demands of Britain's monopoly of world shipping. In a myriad of different ways, the conditions of the labour aristocracy were bound up with the maintenance of British imperialism. And this fact was bound to be reflected in their political standpoint.

To sum up: Corr and Brown show an amazing ignorance of the contemporary recognition of the existence of this privileged stratum; at each and every stage, they prefer to rely on bourgeois historians writing up to a century later. Their argument that 'in fact no new layer emerged which was materially and socially distinguishable from the rest of the working class in a way which was different from long established differentiation' (p67) is quite unsustainable in terms of all the contrary contemporary opinion. The point is that such a development within the working class was inevitable if the ruling class were to survive in conditions where the working class were becoming ever more preponderant numerically, and where there was a commensurate increase in their potential political and economic power. Furthermore, the emergence of the labour aristocracy was linked with the maturation of bourgeois democracy: only at that point in time when the ruling class could be satisfied that the working class would use the vote 'wisely' would they in fact receive it. Marx and Engels were well aware of the significance of the treachery of the Reform League; Corr and Brown over a century later are not.

from Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 116, December 1993/January 1994
Watchdogs of Capitalism
The Reality of the Labour Aristocracy Part 2

In his continuing analysis of the SWP's position on the labour aristocracy, ROBERT CLOUGH, having shown how Corr and Brown distort Marx and Engels, examines their critique of Lenin's theory.
Last issue, we showed how Corr and Brown (International Socialism, No. 59, Summer 1993) misrepresented Marx and Engels in their efforts to deny the existence of a labour aristocracy in nineteenth-century Britain. With the assertion that neither Marx nor Engels 'had a consistent analysis of such a phenomenon', they concluded 'much less that their use of the term laid the basis for a causal explanation of reformism in the way which Lenin uses it., (Corr and Brown, p39) This article shows that they have as little basis for their position on Lenin as they did on Marx and Engels.

Although Lenin's analysis of the nature and role of the labour aristocracy was most fully developed during the First Imperialist War, his awareness of the connection between opportunism and imperialism was already evident in his contribution to the debate on 'socialist colonialism' at the 1907 congress of the Second International. The debate, on a proposition that advanced capitalist countries had the right to colonial possessions as part of a broader 'civilising' mission, revealed widespread support for such racism (from German trade unionists to Ramsay MacDonald, an ILP delegate), even though it was eventually out-voted. Reporting the discussion, Lenin wrote:

'Only the proletarian class, which maintains the whole of society, can bring about the social revolution. However, as a result of the extensive colonial policy, the European proletarian partly finds himself in a position when it is not his labour, but the labour of the practically enslaved natives in the colonies, that maintains the whole of society ... In certain countries this provides the material and economic basis for infecting the proletariat with colonial chauvinism. Of course, this may be only a temporary phenomenon, but the evil must nonetheless be clearly realised and its causes understood.' (Collected Works [CW], Vol 13, p77)
Significantly, at the same Congress, Lenin had also opposed the unconditional admission of the Labour Party to the Second International because of its refusal to recognise the existence of the class struggle. Politically, Labour was still tied completely to the Liberal Party as the most effective means of representing the interests of the upper stratum of the working class. The division between this small minority and the mass of the working class was as great as it had been in Engels' day: a study by the Liberal Sir Leo Chiozza-Money in 1905 estimated that 33 million out of a population of 43 million lived in poverty, of whom 13 million lived in destitution. In 1911, it was estimated that it required 30 shillings per week to support a family in minimal comfort: 5 million out of 8 million manual workers earned less than this, their average income being 22 shillings per week. During this period, the normal wage for skilled workers was some 40 shillings per week.

The Labour Aristocracy and the Working Class

It is impossible to understand Lenin's conception of the role of the labour aristocracy unless we accept his starting point: that the proletariat must be a revolutionary class because of its position within capitalist society. This revolutionary character is expressed first in its actions, and subsequently in its consciousness. This distinction is vital: that is why Lenin spoke of the political work 'that brings closer and merges into a single whole the elemental destructive forces of the masses and the conscious destructive force of the organisation of revolutionaries.' (Lenin, CW, Vol 5 p512) In the beginning was the deed: thus Marx quotesGoethe in Chapter One of Capital, giving his warm approval to this pithy statement of the materialist position. The starting point for the development of revolutionary consciousness within the working class is its 'spontaneous movement' (Lenin, CW, Vol 4 p260), not the other way around.

Given this, it is the role of the labour aristocracy to undermine, fragment and destroy this spontaneous movement in order to prevent the working class acquiring a consciousness of its revolutionary role. Through its control of the organisation of the working class, its privileged access to resources such as finance, the media, meeting halls and so on, the labour aristocracy actively fights to isolate every act of working class resistance to prevent it developing a revolutionary character. Thus there is no single act of betrayal, but a continual process of struggle in which the opportunists pit themselves against the emerging movement of the proletariat, and in which the defeat of the labour aristocracy is the precondition to the working class achieving self-consciousness.

With this in mind, we can understand how Corr and Brown 'disprove Lenin: it is by turning the problem back to front. They do not believe the working class is capable of struggling in a revolutionary manner until it has achieved a revolutionary consciousness. Thus they are obsessed with the backwardness of the working class, or as they term it, 'mass reformism'; and this fixation means that they cannot conceive how the proletariat is forced despite itself into the movement which is the precondition for transcending its backwardness. Corr and Brown draw here on their mentor Tony Cliff, who argued in the early years of the boom that the working class in the countries in the West 'show a stubborn adherence to reformism, a belief in the possibility of major improvement in conditions under capitalism'. He continued:

'Why is this so? Why the general apathy and rejection of revolutionary changes in society, when humanity as a whole is in the grip of life and death struggles? Only if we find the correct answer to this question can we answer a further one: for how long can reformism push aside revolutionary aspirations in the working class?' (all quotes drawn from 'The Economic Roots of Reformism', in Neither Washington Nor Moscow, 1982)
For Cliff, the way Lenin 'explained reformism, or to use the term he coined, opportunism' was inadequate, because 'an inevitable conclusion...is that a small thin crust hides the urges of the mass of workers. Any break in this crust would reveal a surging revolutionary lava. The role of the revolutionary party is simply to show the mass of the workers that their interests are betrayed by the "infinitesimal minority" of the "aristocracy of labour".' But according to Cliff, this 'is not confirmed by the history of reformism in Britain, the United States and elsewhere over the past half century: its solidity, its spread throughout the working class, frustrating and largely isolating all revolutionary minorities makes it abundantly clear that the economic, social roots of reformism are not in "an infinitesimal minority of the proletariat and working masses as Lenin had argued.'

So the critical issue is the reformist or backward consciousness of the working class: it is this that explains the absence of revolutionary struggle. However, the social and political conditions of 1957 when Cliff wrote this are a surer guide as to why there should be no revolutionary struggle: imperialist boom was creating 'full' employment and rising living standards. Lenin was writing in a quite different period of deep social and economic crisis when 'the actuality of proletarian revolution' (Lukacs) was no empty phrase. Conditions in the first quarter of this century threw the working class into constant struggle regardless of its prevailing level of consciousness; and at every stage, the labour aristocracy used its privileged position to frustrate, limit and undermine that struggle, and as a consequence frustrate, limit and undermine the development of an independent class consciousness. Thus Cliff's reference to 'surging revolutionary lava' is a ludicrous and bombastic caricature: the labour aristocracy as the 'class enemy within the camp of the proletariat' was indeed the critical obstacle to the development of communist movements, not as Cliff would have it, 'reformism', or the class enemy of the proletariat within its own mind.

Corr and Brown take Cliff's standpoint and attempt to give it a veneer of scientific respectability by culling numerous quotations from respectable bourgeois labour historians. The only basis on which they choose these academics is their common hostility to Lenin. Thus they can be Eurocommunists, structuralists, avowed revisionists or anti Marxists - Corr and Brown don't particularly care. Hence they see no methodological problem in treating the arguments developed by (say) Henry Pelling or AE Musson, reactionary bourgeois historians the pair of them (sorry: academics with a 'particular Whig interpretation of labour history' - Corr and Brown, p73) as of equal validity to those advanced by Lenin. We can only assume that Corr and Brown believe that these historians are neutral figures whose statements possess a scientific objectivity in and of themselves - a preposterous position for those who claim to recognise theexistence of a class-divided society.

For our part, there is a good reason as to why Corr and Brown have no methodological axe to grind with such people: they share the same class position, that of the petit bourgeoisie. And whilst the preconditions for the working class acquiring revolutionary consciousness is its spontaneous movement, it is the other way round for the petit bourgeoisie: they must acquire the consciousness before the commitment to the struggle. The result is that Corr and Brown, along with radical bourgeois historians, project their class position on to the proletariat. The obsession with reformism is none other than an obsession with the problem of the consciousness of the petit bourgeoisie.

Lenin on Opportunism

So what did Lenin really mean by 'opportunism', and how does it differ from the concept of 'reformism' advanced by Corr, Brown, Cliff and the bourgeois academics they cite? Essentially, it is an alliance between the ruling class and a privileged stratum of the working class directed against the mass of the working class. Thus he argued:

'The relative "peaceful" character of the period between 1871 and 1914 served to foster opportunism first as a mood, then as a trend. until finally it formed a group or stratum among the labour bureaucracy and petty bourgeois fellow- travellers. These elements were able to gain control of the labour movement only by paying lip-service to revolutionary aims.' (CW Vol 22, p111)
And later on:

'A few crumbs of the bourgeoisie's huge profits may come the way of the small group of labour bureaucrats, labour aristocrats, and petit-bourgeois fellow-travellers. Social chauvinism and opportunism have the same class basis, namely the alliance of a small section of privileged workers with their national bourgeoisie against the working class masses; the alliance between the lackeys of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the class the latter is exploiting. (ibid, p112)
An alliance against the working class: hence Lenin's fondness for the phrase 'labour lieutenants of the capitalist class' as a description of the labour aristocracy. Yes, this represents a considerable development of Marx' and Engels' arguments, but there is no call for criticism on this account (see Corr and Brown p45). Events had moved on since the 1880s and 1890s: Lenin was writing in the midst of an imperialist war, where despite its earlier protestations, the leadership of the Second International were either openly or tacitly supporting 'their' ruling class in a revolting slaughter of working class people with the aim of deciding how to re-divide the colonies amongst the major capitalist powers. If Marxism could not keep pace with such changes, it could no longer be the science of revolution.

The war had revealed the existence of three trends within the socialist movement: the open opportunists, who enthusiastically supported 'their' ruling class (in Britain, the entire trade union leadership and the overwhelming majority of the Labour Party), the pacifists, who proclaimed their opposition to the war but refused to organise against it or to break with the opportunists who supported it (in Britain, Ramsay MacDonald, and in Germany, Karl Kautsky), and lastly the revolutionaries, who called for the defeat of 'their' imperialism and organised to achieve this end (in Britain, John Maclean, in Ireland, James Connolly, in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg, and in Russia, Lenin). Marxism had to explain the origin of those trends hostile to the working class, and Lenin alone of the revolutionaries was able to do so. But he then went further and translated this understanding into the practical political position which led to the defeat of Russian opportunism and the triumph of the October revolution. What we are discussing therefore is not Lenin's so-called crudeness or one-sidedness, but quite the opposite: his complete theoretical superiority to any other living socialist.

Now Corr and Brown find themselves in all sorts of trouble as they try to develop their criticisms of Lenin. On the one hand, they declare that Lenin talked a lot about the labour aristocracy, but had no consistent idea as to who it encompassed. On the other, they say he could not have been thinking of any section of the working class such as Engels' carpenters and engineers, for if he were, 'there were enormous implications for the concept of proletarian revolution, when whole sections of the working class would becastigated as "watchdogs of capitalism and corrupters of the labour movement"' (p46) the implication apparently being that there could not be any proletarian revolution whatsoever. Yet Corr and Brown exaggerate these 'whole sections' were always a minority in Lenin's view, and might anyway be thrown back into the mass of the working class under the impact of the overall crisis. In other words, the impoverishment of sections of the labour aristocracy was a thesis as uncontentious as the proletarianisation of sections of the petit bourgeoisie (even, possibly, some former academics). This of course happened in the 1920s in Britain; as John Foster observed, 'The previously "aristocratic" sections [skilled engineers, shipbuilders, textile workers and miners - RC] now came under crippling attack. Their local cultural institutions (the backbone of the old "framework" of control) disappeared into the abyss of unemployment'. However, he then continued:

'Yet to see this as the end would be to miss the whole essence of the labour aristocracy, to see it purely descriptively, in just one of its forms, and ignore its historical role and development: as the active process by which labour's class organisation was purged of anti-capitalist elements and made safer for economism and spontaneity.' (in ed J Skelley: The General Strike, p31)
And indeed the 'active process was to continue, with new sections of the working class being elevated in the 1930s to a level of privilege that had been previously enjoyed by skilled workers in those industries on which British capitalist prosperity had been built at the beginning of the century. But Corr and Brown are adamant: it 'makes no sense to think that Lenin saw the labour aristocracy in these workers. Lenin in fact used the term "labour aristocracy" to refer to reformist leaders (in particular to Kautsky)' (p 46). 'In fact', Lenin did not use the term 'labour aristocracy to refer to Kautsky - far from it: to Lenin, they were separate trends, and he repeatedly stressed the distinction, right from 1914 through to 1917. As he wrote in a work Corr and Brown claim to have read:

'Kautskyism is not an independent trend, because it has no roots either in the masses or in the privileged stratum which has deserted to the bourgeoisie. But the danger of Kautskyism lies in the fact that, utilising the ideology of the past, it endeavours to reconcile the proletariat with that party and thereby enhance the latter's prestige. The masses no longer follow the avowed social chauvinists...The Kautskyites' masked defence of the social chauvinists is far more dangerous.' (CW Vol 23, p119)
And in 1917:

'I might remark, in passing, that Souvarine is wrong in maintaining that "they [ie, the Russian comrades who speak of the collapse of the Second International] equate men like Kautsky, Longuet, etc with nationalists of the Scheidemann and Renaudel type". Neither I nor the Party to which I belong (the RSDLP Central Committee) have ever equated the social chauvinist viewpoint with that of the "Centre". In our official Party statements, in the Central Committee manifesto published November 1 1914, and in the resolutions adopted in March 1915...we have always drawn a dividing line between the social chauvinists and the "Centre". The former, in our opinion, have defected to the bourgeoisie. With regard to them we demand not merely struggle, but a split. The latter hesitate, vacillate, and their efforts to unite the socialist masses with the chauvinist leaders causes the greatest damage to the proletariat.' (CW Vol 23, pp195-6)

There is no doubt that Corr and Brown do not know what they are talking about. But this is not a matter of simple ignorance. If Kautsky was no more than a common or garden labour aristocrat as they suggest, then the trend that his position represents de facto cannot exist. Life is not so simple, for as Lenin argued, such a trend must and will come into existence in order to reconcile sections of the working class with the open and discredited opportunists. Henderson had to have his MacDonald, and Scheidemann his Kautsky, since on their own Henderson and Scheidemann could no longer command the allegiance of the revolutionary sections of the working class. Today, it is no different: John Smith must have his Kautsky or MacDonald whose task it is to reconcile radicalised sections of the working class with the rotten traditions of the Labour Party. And how might we expect that trend to act? In the 1980s, it would form an uncritical alliance with the Labour left in pacifist opposition to the Falklands War; in the l990s, it would renew that alliance in an equally pacifist opposition to the Gulf War. It might offer occasional criticisms of individual Labour leaders as they revelled in the slaughter of the Iraqi people, but not of the Party as a whole - indeed, the trend would remind its supporters that they should still vote for Labour despite its barbarity. And how would it justify this? Why,by explaining that Labour is despite everything a 'workers party' - 'capitalist' maybe, with a 'reformist' leadership certainly, but at the end of the day, still a workers party. And what organisation has adopted these positions and arguments? Corr and Brown will know - the SWP!

The correspondence between the Kautsky of 1914-17 and the SWP of today runs deeper. They share the notion that the problem for socialists is the backwardness of the working class - Kautsky used this to justify his refusal to break from the chauvinists since he would thereby break from the 'masses'. The corollary of this is that both Kautsky and the SWP condemn the spontaneous struggles of the working class since it exposes their alliance with opportunism. Thus the SWP has consistently opposed armed liberation struggles - which should be more properly described as revolutionary than spontaneous - especially that of the republican movement; it condemned black and white youth during the 1981 and later uprisings, and it condemned the miners' hit squads during the 1984-85 strike. It is clear then that the issue is not the 'backwardness' of the working class, but the backwardness of the SWP and the class position that its politics represent - that of the petit bourgeoisie.

Once we understand the interests that Corr and Brown's arguments serve, we can appreciate the full measure of their shallowness. The ambiguous class position of the petit bourgeoisie expresses itself in their reluctance to adopt a partisan position - hence Corr and Brown's pseudo-objectivity, their willingness to accept at face value the positions of bourgeois academia, the 'on the one hand on the other' presentation of their views. Indeed, it is partisanship that they criticise in Lenin, when they suggest that 'disillusion at the collapse of the Second International probably made it very difficult to avoid a certain amount of moralism, even among the finest revolutionaries' (p48). The inference is clear: Lenin allowed his judgement to be clouded by subjective feelings. 'Moralism' here is a pejorative 'moralistic' elsewhere in the article - but we must remember that only the privileged can afford the luxury of amorality and pretend that morality. and objectivity are polar opposites. Communist and revolutionaries reject this: there is a very definite working class morality, and that morality condemned the leadership of the Second International with scientific objectivity in 1914, just as it would condemn those who defended the Labour Party during the slaughter of the Gulf War.

To sum up: Lenin's position is comprehensible only if you start from 'the actuality of proletarian revolution' - that is, from a partisan standpoint. Any other approach must lapse into sociology or psychology, the fate of a bourgeois academia which wants anything hut a proletarian revolution. But the labour aristocracy as Lenin understood is not a sociological concept describing a stratum within, or without, or in some kind of juxtaposition to the working class, hut a historical process connected to the development of imperialism. Corr and Brown cannot understand this since they have not broken from the standpoint of the radical petit bourgeoisie, a standpoint which has to deny the existence of the labour aristocracy in order to ally with its political representatives.

from Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 119, June/July 1994
The Labour Aristocracy
Part 3: Between the Wars

In our previous two articles, we proved that the concept of the labour aristocracy was an integral part of revolutionary theory from Marx's day, and that it was accepted as such by all major theoreticians in the working class movement. We showed how it was that the labour aristocracy created organisations to defend and advance its interests -- exclusive craft unions, and, later, as British imperialism's dominant position in the world was undermined, the Labour Party. We also showed how the newer unskilled unions, formed in opposition to the elitist craft unions, soon succumbed to the prevailing trend of opportunism, their leadership absorbed into the labour aristocracy. ROBERT CLOUGH continues his analysis of the labour aristocracy.
The inter-war period was to see the destruction of the privileged conditions of those skilled sections of the working class familiar as the labour aristocracy to Marx, Engels and Lenin. This did not however mean that the lahour aristocracy disappeared as a trend in the working class, rather that its composition changed. This article demonstrates how this process started in the 1920s, and a later article will show how their organisations -- the trade unions and the Labour Party -- adapted themselves in order to represent new privileged strata that were to emerge during the 1930s.

The First Imperialist War

The First Imperialist War had greatly accelerated the incorporation of the organisations of the labour aristocracy into the imperialist state. This process had started with the first significant state welfare measures of the pre-war Liberal Government. The introduction of labour exchanges, a national insurance scheme and the Old Age Pensions Act were all initially opposed by the skilled unions. The TUC Parliamentary Committee argued that national insurance should be restricted to trade unionists 'otherwise you will have men to support who never had been nor never will be self-supporting. They are at present parasites on their more industrious fellows and will be the first to avail themselves of the funds the Bill provides.' Such opposition was quickly bought off when the Government offered the unions a role in the administration of these schemes, and soon there proliferated bodies like the Courts of Referees (administering the National Insurance Act) on which there would always be at least one 'labour representative'.

With the outbreak of war, both the Labour Party and the TUC were swift to defend the Empire against the German threat. The TUC proclaimed an industrial truce and organised recruitment drives for the armed forces. The rewards were substantial: participation in all kinds of state committees to oversee production and distribution, and, for the Labour Party, the offer of cabinet positions in the Coalition Government. In return, the labour aristocracy was expected to police the working class, ensuring that there was a minimum of resistance to speed-up, falling wages and dilution of skilled labour.

The post-war boom

In the post-war period, the most immediate role of the Labour Party and the TUC was to help stave off working class pressure that had built up as working class living standards had plummeted. In the circumstances, the ruling class deemed a brief inflationary boom as politically expedient to buy time. It could not afford any domestic challenge whilst it re-shaped the post-war imperialist order in the context of a triumphant Russian Revolution. Hence it gave the trade union leadership some leeway to maintain its authority through the uncertainties of demobilisation.

For a very short period, the trade union movement was to embrace the mass of the unskilled male working class, as membership rose from 2 million in 1910 to 6.5 million in 1918 and 8.3 million in 1920, of whom 6.5 million were affiliated to the TUC. However, despite the enormous struggles of the period, no independent working class movement appeared with a leadership able to challenge such betrayals as the sabotage of the Triple Alliance in April 1921, or their connivance in the partition of Ireland. Union amalgamations created vast new organisations such as AEU, whose rule book still excluded unskilled workers and women, and the T&GWU and the GM. Both the latter unions, organising unskilled and semi-skilled workers, were structured in such a way as to give the maximum of power to unelected officials and thereby minimise the influence of these poorer sections of the working class. They were to become in effect the private fiefdom of a handful of trade union barons, most notably Ernest Bevin, General Secretary of the T&G throughout almost the whole inter-war period. Leaders such as he were truly to become the 'labour lieutenants of the capitalist class'.

It was not merely through its control of the trade union movement that the labour aristocracy sought to undermine the working class movement -- it was also through the manipulation of state welfare. Thus the Labour leader JR Clynes argued in parliament in 1921 that 'organised labour, I am certain, together with the employers, if both were called more in touch with the administration of benefits, could be of great assistance in locating the shirkers, and making it impossible to get money when work could have been got.' And throughout the country, local trade unionists were to play 'hunt the scrounger', often as representatives of Trades Councils on Public Assistance Committees and Boards of Guardians.

The crisis in British industry

From 1921 until after the defeat of the General Strike industrial capital by and large stagnated. Productivity within the coal industry fell substantially: 1.2 million miners produced less coal in 1924 than 1 million did in 1913. Cotton consumption fell and even in the peak year of 1929 amounted to only 1.5 million tons compared to 2.1 million tons in 1913. There was a similar picture for steel, iron and shipbuilding; overall, the value of export manufactured goods in 1923 was 73% of the 1913 level. The captive markets of the Empire were no longer a sufficient compensation for low levels of productivity in these traditional sectors of industry. Such improvements as there were arose more from the intensification of labour than from new investment.

The movement of wages in these sectors reflected the stagnant conditions, fallingsignificantly between 1920 and 1924 -- by 11% in cotton, 14% in shipbuilding, 20% in iron and steel and 26% in coal. In the service sector however, there was a different picture, as wages rose by about 15%. Unemployment showed a similar pattern: in 1926, it was 40% in iron, steel and shipbuilding, 18% in cotton, and only in coal at 9% did it match the prevailing levels of the service sector. The traditional labour aristocracy was experiencing a savage assault on its previously privileged conditions. The brief life of the first Labour Government in 1924 did not change anything, it was noteworthy more for showing the extent to which Labour had usurped the role of representing the interests of the labour aristocracy from the Liberal Party, whose disintegration was now assured.

Beyond the General Strike

In these circumstances, a fall in union membership was inevitable, particularly amongst unskilled workers: by the time of the 1926 General Strike in support of miners facing massive wage cuts, TUC-affiliated membership was down to 4.3 million, two-thirds of its 1920 level. And whilst the government engaged in nine months' intensive preparation from late 1925 for the impending confrontation, the trade union leadership did absolutely nothing. But this inactivity was in its interests: defeat in the General Strike would above all mean defeat for those forces which might threaten its control of working class organisation.

The aftermath of the General Strike was a brief industrial boom lasting until 1929, which set the context for a political offensive by the Labour Party/trade union alliance directed against the small Communist Party. During 1927-28, Communists were banned and proscribed within the Labour Party and the trade unions. This coincided with the Mond-Turner talks of 1928 (Sir Alfred Mond was head of ICI, Ben Turner TUC General Secretary), an attempt to develop an open and public alliance with the increasingly dominant forces of finance capital. Although they achieved little in immediate practical terms, their main political conclusion -- that British industry must completely re-organise and rationalise if it were to compete on the world market -- was to become the refrain of the 1929-31 Labour Government. 'Mondism' was in substance the equivalent of the 'New Realism' of the 1980s. It expressed the self-same interests of a very narrow stratum of the working class as it sought a new accommodation with the ruling class. Thus Bevin could argue that:

'It is all very well for people to talk as if the working class of Great Britain are cracking their shins for a fight and a revolution, and we are holding them back. Are they? There are not many of them as fast as we are ourselves.'
The image of 'militant' trade union leaders was of course far from reality. Between the General Strike and the outbreak of war, there were only two strikes of any significant size -- the 'more looms' dispute of 1932 in the cotton industry, and the 1937 London busmen's strike. The first was a desperate and unsuccessful struggle to resist a massive increase in the intensity of labour; the second was a calculated move by Bevin to destroy the only organised opposition to his rule of the T&G. In both, the Communist Party played a leading role. Otherwise the trade union movement had no relevance forthe mass of the working class from 1926 onward.

In summary, the process of institutionalising the organisations of the labour aristocracy continued throughout the first post-war decade. It took place in a number of ways. Nationally, the amalgamation of unions and their assets created huge monoliths whose first priority was their own preservation. Governmental committees with trade union representation had proliferated, Labour had been allowed to form an administration. At a local level, trade union and Labour leaders had been increasingly involved in local government, and in the administration of centrally-funded state welfare. As a consequence, the organisations they led acquired a certain independence from the more privileged strata of the working class they represented. Hence it was that whilst the old labour aristocracy was to fragment under an unrelenting ruling class offensive, the survival of its organisations was never in doubt. The 1930s would then become a transitional period, where a new labour aristocracy would arise based on the luxury and consumer industries of the Midlands and the South, and where the old organisations would adapt themselves to organise and represent their interests.

Lenin on the aristocracy of labour

2010-02-03T03:05:00.001-08:00

'Only the proletarian class, which maintains the whole of society, can bring about the social revolution. However, as a result of the extensive colonial policy, the European proletarian partly finds himself in a position when it is not his labour, but the labour of the practically enslaved natives in the colonies, that maintains the whole of society ... In certain countries this provides the material and economic basis for infecting the proletariat with colonial chauvinism. Of course, this may be only a temporary phenomenon, but the evil must nonetheless be clearly realised and its causes understood.'(Collected Works [CW], Vol 13, p77)

Considering the Brit bosses have five times the national GDP invested in exploiting workers abroad Lenin's critique takes on real flesh and blood.

Zionist Wash

2010-01-29T01:13:00.000-08:00

Martin Gilbert, cheeky Zionist

Shock horror! the Chilcot investigation into the Iraq War will be a cover up! This was all very predictable of course, although the brazen way the state has gone about it is quite revealing of the ultra arrogance of the unchallenged ruling class. The story goes something like this: Lord Chilcot asked the government for some documents regarding the intelligence and legal advice behind the war. The government said not likely. Chilcot huffed a bit and relented. Result...we are at exactly the same point regarding knowledge of the forged intelligence as we were a year ago, before yet another expensive stitch up by the men in wigs.(1)

This cover up has the particularly sour after taste of Zionism, represented by not less than two ardent Zionists on the five person panel of enquiry into the war. Historians Martin Gilbert and Sir Lawrence Freemen, the former an adviser to Brown on Israel and in his own words 'a proud Zionist' (2), and the latter a foreign policy adviser to Tony Blair, both stand four square behind Israel's bombardment of Palestine, and were prominent supporters of the war.(3) Neither one has since backtracked on any aspect of this pro-war position. This is perfect. The inquiry has the usual worthies of the establishment, conservative and dependable, plus a couple of action intellectuals for a bit of backbone. If the media was anything other than a slavish yachting club for the terminally sycophantic, then the general public may be treated to something a bit more worthy of a war which has killed well over one million people, 99% of them poor and Muslim.

What is there to cover up though? Surely we already know the dossiers were 'sexed' up? The reality of intelligence being pseudo intelligence was clear to all with a basic capacity for reasoned thought way back in 2003. What can possibly be found out by a look at intelligence reports now, and why would the parachuting in of two effective Israeli agents be necessary? Answer: Israel provided pseudo intelligence to British and US Imperialism in the run up to the Iraq War. More than this, Israel has coveted historic Mesopotamia as part of a greater Israel since the genocidal foundation of the state in 1948. The Knesset's (Israeli Parliament) Defense and Intelligence Committee chairman Yuval Steinitz held hearings on the faulty intelligence about Iraq. Although the final report was secret, John K. Cooley recounts that one committee member told him that the report contained damning proof of the systematic exchange of false intelligence about Iraq between the Israeli and U.S. intelligence communities. This was merely a particularly atrocious case of Zionist meddling in the affairs of a target state. The actual history of Israel's attempts to undermine and destroy Iraq-a state viewed as the pre-eminent competitor with Israel for West Asian dominance-goes much further back, including the use of car bombings in Iraqi cities; support for right wing Kurdish irregulars; and most damningly the 1981 Israeli Air Force attack on an Iraqi Nuclear facility, which killed many Iraqi's as well as a French engineer.(see John K.Cooley, An Alliance against Babylon: The U.S., Israel and Iraq, Pluto Press, 2005)

Gilbert has made an academic career as chief hagiographer of Winston Churchill, not to mention his voluminous works on Israel, which has even been criticized by Israeli Zionist, Benny Morris, who describes Gilbert's works as 'propaganda', and condemned them for using inflated figures to support the Zionist case.(4) This contortionist-distortionist framework used by Gilbert has already come into its own during the inquiry. Responding to the charge he could not be impartial due to self proclaimed Zionism, Gilbert absurdly claimed that: “Well, apart from the fact, that as far as I can see, at that time Israel regarded Iran as a greater danger in March 2003, it is just appalling.” Appalling to make the reasonable claim his record of being a propagandist for Zionism could undermine his objectivity when judging the evidence! If anybody doubted Gilbert's commitment to historical accuracy, they have been doubley confirmed by the above statement. Such a pre-eminent historian of Zionism would surely know that Israel had a love affair with both the Shah AND the Islamic reaction which consolidated power after 1979. The convergence of first a secular dictator installed as an anti-Soviet client, and then an ultra conservative regime who saw its principal enemy as a secular-socialist Iraq's allies of Zionism is explainable by the mutual antipathy of both the Shah and the Islamic regime for the rights of the oppressed of the Arab world.. The conflict between Israel and Iran of the 00s cannot be reduced to some grand narrative, and should be rooted in the emergence of Imperialist blocks, in which Iran is coalescing with Russia and China.

Nobody is surprised by yet another whitewash. People should be slightly concerned that despite two years of economic crisis, with the attendant undermining of support for all the bosses parties, the government and state feel it so easy to establish not only a conservative panel, but one with such vocal war mongers and Zionists.

In unrelated news, Gordon Brown has set up a committee of inquiry to determine whether he was the best Chancellor in British history. The panel of judges will be Ed Balls, Sarah Brown, and Gordon Brown himself.

(1) 'Vital documents on Iraq War are held back from war inquiry', In The Daily Telegraph, January 28th, 2010,p.1

(2) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article7006269.ece

(3) http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/61704/lawrence-d-freedman/the-special-relationship-then-and-now

(4) http://books.google.com/books?id=YUthqHRF-m8C&pg=PA61&lpg=PA61&dq=bayit+vegan+border&source=web&ots=mAZ9dkmNCv&sig=jbCr1SB8Odgv4W8OuQP6BN9OfXk&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=7&ct=result#v=onepage&q=bayit%20vegan%20border&f=false

(5)op cit, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article7006269.ece

For a real right to work movment-organise the unorganised in a fight against the bosses system

2010-01-28T02:28:00.001-08:00

The Socialist Workers Party front campaign-the Right to Work Conference-takes place this weekend in Manchester. Boasting an impressive list of speakers, the conference threatens to:

Defend services and pensions
Unite the public and private sectors
Demand a million green jobs
Jobs not bombs
Defend migrant workers – jobs for all

Marx was way ahead of these epigones when he said that the right to work was a bourgeois demand which had no pedagogical power without the clear link to workers control of industry, hiring and firing-that is without a transitional programme. The unwillingness to make the call for a break with union sell outs (indeed, to actively sell out a strike) and fight for the complete, root and branch renewal of our organisations, is something which hamstrings the SWP in their union activity. Instead of these front groups, we need to build unemployed workers associations which are built as part of the fight to reclaim the unions, unions which have been decimated by the economic crisis despite the bluster of the union leaders and the national chauvinist Socialist party that the best way to defend union jobs was by restricting entry to Brit-local workers.

The task for Marxists should be the mobilisation of the unemployed against a system which has given them nothing but poverty and immiseration. The biggest obstacle to this are the misnamed trade union leaderships which are acting as a fifth column for the bosses within the working class. Even something so basic as the fight for jobs needs the ousting of this leadership. This is the task of tasks for the employed and the unemployed. The scab leaderships of our unions have been able to entrench their positions due to an entire epoch of defeats for militant class struggle going all the way back to the miners strike of 1984-5. The lesson that struggle = failure, and that there is no alternative path, be it within the unions or at a societal level, has meant that the right and 'left' leaders have been given a free reign. The social crisis consequent to the global economic meltdown of the last period has removed all stability from this situation. The mass unemployment, always much higher than estimated, has now burst into national life. This reality undermines both the legitimacy of capitalism as a system delivering the goods for broad layers of workers in even the rich Imperialist countries such as Britain, but also undermines the legitimacy of the do nothing trade union leaders.

All who consider themselves communists should have their central task as fighting to lead the unemployed into the union movement in order to wrestle the leadership of our organisations from our enemies. The agitation and propaganda should not be to get fake socialists like Bob Crow and Mark Serwotka onto platforms so as to give a front campaign legitimacy. Bob Crow and Mark Serwotka have refused to fight on behalf of their own workers on numerous occasions, the unskilled and low paid sections most frequently. Serwotka led the 2005 pension sell out for new, lower paid workers in the civil service. He has also presided over the massacre of low paid jobs. Bob Crow, when he is not making racist comments regarding Chinese workers, can be found refusing to back the unskilled and the low paid within the rail industry. As Workers fight highlighted: "In late 2008 when bus and train company National Express announced 750 job cuts in December and proceeded to outline cuts in its East Coast Mainline and East Anglia train services along with job cuts (on the East Coast Mainline, 18% of the on-train catering workforce, for instance), the union delegates to the company council were able to claim that there would not even be any need for voluntary redundancies at some depots - because in fact the company had been topping up its low staffing levels with agency temps, all along. And it was "only" these agency workers who stood to lose their jobs. Of course these workers are not entitled to any statutory notice period nor redundancy pay unless they have been with the company in unbroken employment for two years, which is not the case. This, basically, is how many companies are at present getting away with murdering jobs with impunity, while union bureaucrats boast of having prevented compulsory redundancies!(Workers Fight, 'Britain - The social crisis and the union leaders' response', In Class Struggle, #82, Jan-Feb 2009). These leaders are our enemies. They should be exposed as such by putting forward the basic demand that the unions organise the unemployed and fight against the bosses crisis in the interests of all workers, not simply the trade union workers, almost 50% of whom are professional/skilled workers, and who make up less than one third of the total working class in Britain today.

As the National Minority of Movement of the mid 1920s advocated, the unemployed and the rank and file trades unionists should coalesce:

1. Around a fighting programme.
2. Around concrete demands for union consolidation and reorganisation.
3. Around the necessity for creating a new ideology amongst the union membership.
4. Around the necessity of training and developing a new leadership to replace the old."

This is how JR Campbell of the Communist Party and NMM viewed the tasks of revolutionaries:

“Every candidate for even the most insignificant post should stand on a revolutionary platform. While the communists supported the left officials against the right and strove to transform the “muddled and incomplete left wing viewpoint of the more progressive leaders into a real revolutionary viewpoint”, they warned against reliance on them and never forgot their “main activity must be devoted to capturing the masses”.

Instead of the flabby reformism of the SWP/RTWC demands, the NMM fought for six main demands: a six hour day; a sliding scale of wages and hours (40 hrs pay for 30 hrs work) which would have ended unemployment and forced the bosses to pay for the crisis; unemployment benefits set at the national minimum wage; workers control and management of industry which had failed the mass of workers; a workers government based on the NMM program and movement. By 1926 the NMM had over one million members.

Note the program comes as part of the fight for a new ideology in the unions, a new leadership and new organisations. The first step today, with a much lower level of class struggle and class organisation must be-organise the unorganised-the temps, the migrants and the agency staff so long ignored. Build unemployed workers unions. Without organisation there can be no political fight

The TUC to the rescue of the middle class-working class! We need communist unions

2010-01-17T12:55:00.000-08:00

The Trades Union Congress is a rather a rarefied organisation at the best of times. This umbrella organisation for the vast majority of Britain's trades unions, currently 6.7 million strong, has a brief of to act as the eyes and ears of the unions, combating the bias against organised labour at government level, whilst producing research and policy papers to attempt to influence legislation. The official brief is set out as follows:

The Trades Union Congress:

-brings Britain’s unions together to draw up common policies
-lobbies the Government to implement policies that will benefit people at work
-campaigns on economic and social issues
-represents working people on public bodies
-represents British workers in international bodies, in the European Union and at the UN employment body - the International Labour Organisation
-carries out research on employment -related issues
-runs an extensive training and education programme for union representatives
-helps unions develop new services for their members
-helps unions avoid clashes with each other
-builds links with other trade union bodies worldwide

Basic stuff, but clearly focused on working class people in the publicity guff. In reality the TUC, and British unions in Toto, have always failed to be organisations of the working class in general. 6.7 million workers is less than one third of the working class population. The make up of the TUC is also heavily biased in favour of the public sector, where unionisation was easier to achieve; or in the skilled trades of the private sector. In some areas we have the legacy of state sector unionisation combined with the privileged private sector, for instance in the rail industry. So, when the TUC speaks as an advocate of working people in truth it speaks as an advocate of a privileged section of the working class, those in secure/skilled jobs where the costs of organisation and recruitment by full time union bureaucrats is felt to be worth while financially. The neo-liberal phase of capitalist political economy has not wrought significant changes to the higher wages and security of employment in the unionised sectors of the workforce.(1)

The enormous shake-out of industry in Britain, with the mass closure of mines, mills and large industrial plants has had a devastating effect on union density. Unions organised almost 50% of the workforce in 1979, the decline post Callaghan would clearly have effects on wages for the working class generally. This effect has been negative for those not unionised, but positive for those unions which survived. This is despite unions not making any serious effort to organise the unskilled, women, migrants and the like.(2)Those unions that have survived are the stronger and, as such, better able to command a wage premium (thus raising the “batting average” of unions). It is this capacity to garner a wage premium which is the unions central role. Contrary to the popular view on the left that Britain's industrial decline in the twentieth century is synonymous with Britain's decline as a world impenalist power, and therefore with lower real wages for all workers, the obverse is in fact true. Now we can see the significance of Lenin's argument that imperialism is the last stage of capitalism. The export of capital, the creation of large financial corporations and capitalist monopolies and the emergence of rentier states, and growing predominance of financiers and bankers, was the consequence of the increasing problems of finding profitable outlets for 'surplus capital' in all the dominant capitalist countries at the turn of the twentieth century. It was this that Lenin called imperialism, a product of capitalism at that particular time. This process began in the 1870s, with the scramble for Africa. By 1914 the world had already been partitioned, there were no new outlets for profitable investment etc, so it now had to be repartitioned according to the economic power of the major capitalist states. And how else could the matter be decided except by military conflict? But the outcome was not what Lenin or anyone else had expected. Although capitalism was overthrown in Russia, opportunism and chauvinism in all the major working class movements -- something which Lenin could explain -- prevented revolution in all the developed capitalist/imperialist countries. After a second world war, there was an outcome which, although very different, was similar in impact to what Kautsky thought possible under his 'far-fetched' ultra-imperialism. One country, the United States of America, totally dominated the world economy. It was this outcome, which Lenin could not have predicted, which allowed the 'peaceful' rapid expansion of capitalism of the major imperialist countries. The wars and revolutions, the poverty and oppression were confined, for the time being, to the rest of the world.

But the laws of capitalism did not change. The massive export of capital, the growth of financial and transnational corporations with global aspirations continued, and as Japan and Germany rebuilt their economies to become powerful competitors of the United States, inter-imperialist rivalries have reappeared in similar form to those Lenin outlined at the turn of the century. In this respect imperialism is the last stage of capitalism. Imperialism is alive and well and stomping its British jackboot over the lives of hundreds of millions of workers and farmers today in what are described as 'developing countries. Imperialism is fundamentally mono–poly capitalism. It is the historical period of the decay of capitalism and is characterised by parasitism. Imperialism is the era of finance capital in which enormously concentrated banking capital has fused with industrial and commercial capital. The export of capital – that is global investment – as opposed to export of commodities becomes the distinguishing feature of imperialism.

As a result capitalism has grown into a global system of national oppression and of financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of advanced countries. Imperialism divides the world between oppressed and oppressor nations; at the same time it brings about class differentiation within both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – the existence of purely parasitic financiers [rentier class] and the labour aristocracy bribed out of the superprofits of imperialism. Finally, after the territorial division of the world by a small number of rich capitalist countries at the beginning of the 20th century, the different pace of development of monopoly capitalism in different countries drives nations into conflicts that can only be resolved by force – that is by war.(3) This is what makes sense of the warmongering by US and UK Imperialism regards Iran.

Lenin was concerned to show how imperialism splits the working class movement and creates opportunist currents in the working class movement internationally, arguing that the ‘fight against imperialism is a sham and humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism.’ That is why he attacks Kautsky who attempted to contain irreconcilable trends of the left and right within the same socialist movement, to justify ‘unity’ with the apologists of imperialism, refused to fight opportunism, and found himself and his followers united with the extreme (right) opportunists supporting imperialist war. Kautsky detached the politics of imperialism from its economics. Kautskyism, Lenin argued, is not an independent trend, because it has no roots either in the masses or in the privileged stratum of the working class which had gone over to the side of the bourgeoisie. It attempts to reconcile the working class with the ‘bourgeois labour party’ to preserve the unity of the working class with that party. It is, Lenin argued, the ‘inevitable fruit of the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie, whose entire way of life holds them captive to bourgeois and petty bourgeois prejudices’. Such tendencies have to be combated by the party of the proletariat.

Britain’s relative industrial decline has been combined with a dynamic, aggressive imperialist expansion of commerce and finance overseas. This development has now reached unprecedented levels. Britain’s overseas assets in 2005 were £4,837.1bn, nearly four times Britain’s GDP. 56.4% of these assets, £2,727bn, more than double Britain’s GDP, were ‘other investments’, mainly loans and deposits abroad by UK banks – a ‘gigantic usury capital’. Only 15.6% of the overseas assets, £753.2bn, were direct investments (an investment in an enterprise abroad with 10% or more shares or voting stock), and 27.5%, £1,332.1bn, were portfolio investments (investments in shares, bonds and money market instruments). Britain’s overseas assets are now increasing every year by around 60% of Britain’s GDP. Since 1997 when the Labour government came to power they have increased nearly two and a half times. In 2005 at the current exchange rate they were 92% of the size of US foreign assets – $9,190.5bn to $10,008.7bn. However the foreign assets of the US were only equivalent to around 80% of the US GDP.(4)

At a certain historical point the tendency towards Imperialism expresses itself profound crisis:

‘The aggressive character of imperialism likewise necessarily flows from a crisis of valorisation.* Imperialism is a striving to restore the valorisation of capital at any cost, to weaken or eliminate the breakdown tendency. This explains its aggressive policies at home (an intensified attack on the working class) and abroad (a drive to transform foreign nations into tributaries). This is the hidden basis of the bourgeois rentier state, of the parasitic character of capitalism at an advanced stage of accumulation. Because the valorisation of capital fails in countries at a given, higher stage of accumulation, the tribute that flows in from abroad assumes ever greater importance. Parasitism becomes a method of prolonging the life of capitalism.’(5)

It is this point, when even the higher wages engendered by Britain's leading role as a exploiter of the world become an impossibility that we have the opportunity to transform the organisations of the working class, primarily the trade unions. This will not be done by the current leadership of the Trades Union Congress, which has recently issued a policy brief on why the government need to save the hard working middle class, which the TUC conflate as anybody on 21k per year. This judgement takes the US approach to class relations, which sees all people as middle class. There may be a rich and a poor at the marginal ends but basically everyone is middle class.Bear in mind, the TUC has a defined brief as fighting for working class people, not a vacuous middle class. The brief ends thus (concerning who the TUC and Labour should be on the side of): 'the real middle Britain, they remain the great neglected electoral group, doing badly under the Conservatives and standing still at best under Labour.'(6)

This utter tosh is what passes for TUC leadership today. To make such claims as these is to ignore the world imperialist role of the British capitalist class. A shown above, our masters currently have almost 5 times the national GDP invested abroad. The tribute from this is what allows our bloated middle class, which is people on way above 21k, to maintain their lifestyles. Th real middle class are those professionals/small business owners who are not economically, nor culturally close to the working class. This new sociological chicanery is the flip side of the 'we are all middle class now' thesis developed by neo-liberals who wanted to smash industry in Britain.

This classification of middle class in American terms is simply a method of denying a working class, a la US, for the reason that if you admit a working class exists then you have to really admit a non working - bosses class exists also. Where is the evidence that even the broad layers of the working class have done badly under Labour? Anybody who has gone to a hospital, a school, a city center etc in the last ten yrs should attest to the real material benefits which flow from being the worlds second Imperialist power. The tax take from the City of London used to make up a third of all tax receipts, providing the revenue for the funding of the NHS and Education, which, whilst standing below the level of Sweden perhaps has matched Franco-German spending through the 00s.(7) PFI schemes have undermined the benefit of this to working class people, allowing parasites to take large swathes of this funding. This reality does not challenge the idea that the better off workers gathered in the trade unions, as well as the middle classes, have been complicit in a social imperialism based on the super exploitation of the workers and poor abroad. Their is no escaping this reality.

The solution to this social Imperialism is the extension of the trade unions to the poorest sections of the working class. The early trade unions were built by the poorest and most oppressed groups, such as farm and mill labourers, and operated as strike funds and solidarity committees, rather than the permanent bureaucracies of today. The struggle must also be waged to win the leadership of the unions. This would make possible a class struggle, as opposed to a class collaboration approach to worker-boss relations. This would not go far enough though. Between 1979 and 2005 the total number of workforce jobs has increased 13.2%, while public service jobs have risen by 36.8%, total service jobs by 46.1%, and finance and business services by a massive 111%. Manufac–turing jobs have over the same period declined by more than half – 52.3%. Workforce jobs in the manufacturing sector in September 2006 at 3.03m are at the lowest level since records began in 1841. Manufacturing output at the end of 2005 was no higher than it was when Labour came into power in 1997. Over the same period Britain’s industrial base fell to less than 16% of the British economy. In 2005 financial services alone accounted for 8.5% of GDP, up from 5.5% five years ago, while the share of manufacturing has fallen by over one third in 10 years to 13.6% of GDP. The struggle against allowing a working class to become a parasitic organism living off the super exploitation of workers abroad, must begin with winning the unions for communism. Communist led unions would fight for state power so as to expropriate under workers control and management the largest banks, insurance companies, pension funds, hedge funds, and what remains of domestic industry. The foreign holdings of British bosses would be exposed for the workers of the world to see. Workers labouring to feed the parasites of the City of London, and vicariously large swathes of trades unionists in the public sector and the skilled trades would be given ownership of their plants, stocks and shares in an act of solidarity; communist led unions would state clearly : we don't want to exploit you as our bosses did.

How do we get there? Do we rely on the lefts within the unions? No and No again! Bob Crow of the RMT has presided over spectacular victories for train drivers on the London Underground, now some of the highest paid workers in Britain. He has also been complicit in the development of a racial caste of cleaners, many of whom earning below the minimum wage (see, http://brennanism.blogspot.com/2009/11/tube-and-tfl-union-rmt-will-be-holding.html). Crow has also railed against Chinese workers willing, in his words, 'to work for a bowl of rice'! He has also called for an alliance with the mass murdering state to save the jobs of workers who support Naval expeditions against the poor of West and Central Asia (see, http://brennanism.blogspot.com/2010/01/unravelling-trot-bashing.html). Do we trust Serwotka? No! He has managed to lead a union through the loss of 130k members, whilst maintaining the pay and pensions of the older, more secure workforce-classic aristocratic trades unionism (see,http://www.bolshevik.org/Leaflets/PCSbetrayal.html)

We cannot rely on the established lefts within the unions. They are concerned with scrabbling for the crumbs they currently receive from the bosses table. These mis leaders have no qualms about selling out the majority of union members and the wider working class to further that nefarious end.

Workers need a rank and file movement within the trade unions aiming at expanding, renewing and controlling the unions from below. Workers also need clear communist leadership of their organisations to take advantage of the crisis of the system, where even aristocrats such as builders and engineers are forced to fight to defend their pay and conditions, pay and conditions the bosses can no longer afford. This crisis has been our opportunity. A revolutionary led union movement, committed to overthrowing the bosses at home and abroad, and of freeing the chains of parasatism whih have shackled the workers movement for too long is a vital goal all communist trade unionists should be fighting for.

(1) David Blanchflower, 'The Union Wage Premium in the US and the UK' :, p.2

(2Metcalf, D., K. Hansen, and A. Charlwood (2001), ‘Unions and the Sword of Justice: Unions and Pay Systems, Pay Inequality, Pay Discrimination and Low Pay’, National Institute Economic Review, 176, 61-75.

(3)David Yaffe: http://www.revolutionarycommunist.org/index.php/britain/1042-britain-parasitic-and-decaying-capitalism-frfi-194-dec-2006-jan-2007.html

(4)ibid

(5) Henryk Grossman: The law of accumulation and breakdown of the capitalist system, Pluto Press, pp122-3)

(6) Who are the middle classes?: ToUChstone blog: A public policy blog from the TUC - http://www.touchstoneblog.org.uk

(7) Polly Toynbee, 'A spending landmine that enshrines Labour priorities for years'://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/29/taxandspending-economics

Global Warming is a Farce, article by Alexander Cockburn

2010-01-08T11:04:00.001-08:00

Interesting article on subject of global warming. Funny how the solutions to man made global warming always involve workers consuming less whilst paying more in tax to the Imperialist state etc, when proposed by the bosses and their political flunkey's. If the world is veering towards a meltdown then only a world socialist plan, the consequence of a world revolutionary process, can solve such fundamental problems.

December 24, 2009
Anthropogenic Global Warming is a Farce

By Alexander Cockburn
The global warming jamboree in Copenhagen was surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled in 325 AD for the Council of Nicaea to debate whether God the Father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and the Holy Ghost.

Shortly before the Copenhagen summit, the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the Web more than a thousand e-mails either sent from or received at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, headed by Dr. Phil Jones. The CRU was founded in 1971 with funding from sources including Shell and British Petroleum. It became one of the climate-modeling grant mills supplying tainted data from which the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concocted its reports.

Deceitful manipulation of data, concealment or straightforward destruction of inconvenient evidence, vindictive conspiracies to silence critics, are par for the course in all scientific debate. But in displaying all these characteristics, the CRU e-mails graphically undermine the claim of the Warmers that they command the moral as well as scientific high ground. It has been a standard ploy of the Warmers to revile the skeptics as whores of the energy industry, swaddled in munificent grants and with large personal stakes in discrediting AGW. Actually, the precise opposite is true. Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate-modeling enterprises and a vast archipelago of research departments and "institutes of climate change" across academia. It's where the money is. Skepticism, particularly for a young climatologist or atmospheric physicist, can be a career breaker.

Many of the landmines in the CRU e-mails tend to buttress longstanding charges by skeptics (yours truly included) that statistical chicanery by professor Michael Mann and others occluded the highly inconvenient Medieval Warm Period, running from 800 to 1300 AD, with temperatures in excess of the highest we saw in the 20th century, a historical fact that makes nonsense of the thesis that global warming could be attributed to the auto-industrial civilization of the 20th century. Here's Keith Briffa, of the CRU, letting his hair down in an e-mail Sept. 22, 1999: "I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data' but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. ... I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago."

Now, in the fall of 1999, the IPCC was squaring up to its all-important "Summary for Policymakers" - essentially a press release, one that eventually featured the notorious graph flatlining into nonexistence the Medieval Warm Period and displaying a terrifying, supposedly unprecedented surge in 20th-century temperatures.

Briffa's reconstruction of temperature changes, one showing a mid- to late-20th-century decline, was regarded by Mann, in a Sept. 22, 1999, e-mail to the CRU, as a "problem and a potential distraction/detraction." So Mann, a lead author on this chapter of the IPCC report, simply deleted the embarrassing post-1960 portion of Briffa's reconstruction. The CRU's Jones happily applauded Mann's deceptions in an e-mail in which he crowed over "Mike's Nature trick."

Other landmines include e-mails from Kevin Trenberth, the head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. On Oct. 14, he wrote to the CRU's Tom Wigley: "How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geo-engineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!"

Only a few weeks before Copenhagen, here is a scientist in the inner AGW circle disclosing that "we are no where close to knowing" how the supposedly proven AGW warming model might actually work, and that therefore geoengineering - such as carbon mitigation - is "hopeless."

This admission edges close to acknowledgment of a huge core problem: that "greenhouse" theory violates the second law of thermodynamics, which says that a cooler body cannot warm a hotter body without compensation. Greenhouse gases in the cold upper atmosphere cannot possibly transfer heat to the warmer earth, and in fact radiate their absorbed heat into outer space. (Readers interested in the science can read Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf Tscheuschner's "Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within the Frame of Physics," updated in January 2009.)

Recent data from many monitors including the CRU, available on climate4you.com, show that the average temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans near the surface of the earth has decreased significantly across the past eight years or so. CO2 is a benign gas essential to life, occurring in past eras at five times present levels. Changes in atmospheric CO2 do not correlate with human emissions of CO2, the latter being entirely trivial in the global balance.

The battles in Nicaea in 325 were faith based, with no relation to science or reason. So were the premises of the Copenhagen summit, that the planet faces catastrophic warming caused by manmade CO2 buildup, and that human intervention - geoengineering - could avert the coming disaster. Properly speaking, it's a farce. In terms of distraction from cleaning up the pollutants that are actually killing people, it's a terrible tragedy.

Copyright 2009 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/12/24/anthropogenic_global_warming_is_a_farce.html at January 08, 2010 - 01:03:39 PM CST

Anti Imperialism is the key to fighting fascism

2010-01-05T08:04:00.000-08:00

Gordon Brown has slammed a militant group, Islam4 UK, who plan to demonstrate against returning murderers (troops)in Wooton Basset. Such statements (see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/04/wootton-bassett-islam4uk-parade-troops) are of course to expected from this savant of the bosses. Also to be expected is the hysteria amongst some sections of the left, who greeted the news that the British fascist English Defence League were planning a counter demonstration in support of Imperialist butchers, with undisguised horror. Individuals from groups such as the Alliance for Workers Liberty are joining facebook groups condemning what is described as 'Islamo-fascism' in the non Marxist parlance of this third campist outfit.(http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=231086644930&ref=mf).

How should communists approach anti-Imperialist resistance by groups which have reactionary social platforms and which are not part of the working class, although having the allegiance of important and fighting sections of the class? Islam4UK seem to have the ear of a small but militant section of mostly poor/working class Asian and Muslim youth. To simply condemn the righteous anger of these oppressed groups - anger at both Imperialism and the effective neo-colonialism they face within Britian - is the politics of the playground. Opposition to the Trotskyist and Leninist understanding of the anti Imperialist united front is the foundation stone of what communists have come to know of as third campism - that is, the refusal to defend colonial countries/oppressed groups from attacks by the bosses and their fascist adjuncts. The rationale for this is that such groups/regimes have anti working class politics. The real cause of this effective support for Imperialism, and in this case the fascists, is the housebroken form of socialism these groups espouse, riddled with bourgeois morality and liberal, as opposed to a Marxist understanding of how to best defend the oppressed and defeat the bosses.

All communists who can should attend the demo against these butchers of Iraqi and Afghan peoples, making the case with secular, socialist and anti Imperialist slogans. If the reactionary leadership of Islam4 UK attempted to split the demo and attack our side then more power to us in appearing as the best defenders of oppressed peoples, seeking unity with all those fighting Imperialism. We may even make inroads to the people attracted to what amounts to the anti Imperialism of fools. Anybody attending as a third campist, effectively ignoring the march of the bosses troops, is siding with them and Messrs Obama, Brown, Patraeus et al.

This quote from Trotsky, taken from a discussion concerning the importance of communists being the most implacble fighers against Imperialist tyranny has much to credit it today. If we extend the last line to include the absurdity of reducing world antagonisms to the struggle between democracy/secularism and fascism/Islamo fascism and us socialists, then we are on the way to understanding how we should approach the likes of this planned demo.

"I will take the most simple and obvious example. In Brazil there now reigns a semifascist regime that every revolutionary can only view with hatred. Let us assume, however, that on the morrow England enters into a military conflict with Brazil. I ask you on whose side of the conflict will the working class be? I will answer for myself personally—in this case I will be on the side of “fascist” Brazil against “democratic” Great Britain. Why? Because in the conflict between them it will not be a question of democracy or fascism. If England should be victorious, she will put another fascist in Rio de Janeiro and will place double chains on Brazil. If Brazil on the contrary should be victorious, it will give a mighty impulse to national and democratic consciousness of the country and will lead to the overthrow of the Vargas dictatorship. The defeat of England will at the same time deliver a blow to British imperialism and will give an impulse to the revolutionary movement of the British proletariat. Truly, one must have an empty head to reduce world antagonisms and military conflicts to the struggle between fascism and democracy. Under all masks one must know how to distinguish exploiters, slave-owners, and robbers!"

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/09/liberation.htm

The CWI and the old Labour Party

2010-01-05T02:10:00.000-08:00

The article below is from the English and Welsh section of the Committee for a Workers International, the Socialist Party. Appearing in Socialism Today, de facto theoretical journal for the International, the piece reflects the thinking of this important grouping on the question of what party working class people need to fight for socialism. Appended to the article are some critical notes from this blogger.

www.socialistworld.net
website of the committee for a workers' international
30 December 2009
Britain

Lessons from Labour’s early history

The British Labour Party was formed over 100 years ago to provide an independent political voice for working-class people. Ed Doveton describes this struggle, which is paralleled by today’s campaign for a new mass workers’ party. First published in Socialism Today
Ed Doveton

THE LABOUR PARTY was founded in 1900, first as the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) then as Labour Party in 1906. It emerged as a broad-based organisation reflecting the diverse range of existing organisations already developed by working people under capitalism. It encompassed the varied working-class political trends: the newly organised, militant, unskilled workers; the more traditional skilled workers; those involved in the co-operative movement; and others focused on issues such as education. Within its ranks were socialists, Marxists and reformists, such as those in the Fabian Society. The Labour Party in that sense became an arena within which the political arguments for socialism, and the differing policies and tactics to achieve it, were debated. It was seen by the working class as a tool with which it could fight for change, as a class.

A long period of struggle had preceded the foundation of the Labour Party, centred on the idea of establishing independent political representation of the working class, separate from the existing capitalist parties. In the 1890s, the major obstacles to the new workers’ party were two-fold. Firstly, the organisational support given by the traditional trade unions to the Liberal Party. Secondly, the mass electoral support for the Liberals and Tories by those working class men who did have the vote.
In an ironic twist of history, the situation in the 1890s has similarities 100 years later in our present day politics. Once again, socialists and class-conscious trade unionists have begun struggling for the creation of a new workers’ party. This time, however, the major obstacle is not from the Liberal Party but from New Labour. This party has become a clone of the capitalist parties it was set up to replace!
In the 1890s, the major trade unions saw the Liberal Party as the political party which would best represent their interests, although the unions were not formally affiliated to it. National and local union officials were often Liberal Party members and were wined and dined by the Liberal hierarchy. Trade unionists would put forward a version of Liberal ideology: that the economy of ‘the country’ was important and that the interests of capital and labour could often be the same.

This attachment of trade union officialdom to the Liberal Party began 40 years earlier in 1867, during the culmination of a mass working-class movement demanding the right to vote. The years 1866 and 1867 had witnessed large demonstrations all over the country and a mass rally in London which ended with a riot in Hyde Park. The establishment parties were fearful of a growing mood that hinted at revolution. To stem the tide, they quickly passed legislation giving the vote to millions of urban working-class males. The victory was incomplete, not least the exclusion of women and rural workers. But, in the ensuing general election, the Liberal Party moved quickly to absorb the trade union leadership in a successful attempt to capture sections of the new working-class voters.

The Liberal grip

THROUGHOUT THE following three decades the links between the unions and the Liberal Party remained solid. Over this period, the Liberals were seen by many as the ‘natural party’ for the working class. Some workers became Liberal councillors and in mining areas, where the working class vote was overwhelming, trade unionists actually became Liberal MPs (becoming known as the Lib-Lab MPs). Trade union leaders would argue that their relationship with the Liberal Party was beneficial, and would point to minor pieces of legislation, passed by Liberal governments, that helped the working class or the trade unions directly. The term used by these working-class Liberals was ‘labour representation’. This concept was expressed year after year during the 1880s and early 1890s at the TUC annual conference, as the TUC parliamentary committee reported on its work with the Liberal establishment.
Within this convivial partnership there were constant tensions. A relationship between a capitalist party like the Liberals and the working class is full of contradictions. When it came down to a direct decision about favouring profits and capitalism against working-class interests, it was always the former which was supported. Often employers headed the local Liberal Party establishment or, at a national level, the Liberal Party would simply ignore calls for more deep-seated reforms, such as the demand for the eight-hour day. The antagonism was also expressed in an attempt by the Liberal Party to keep out the undesirable working class from representing the party as councillors or MPs, not dissimilar to the control on these positions by the contemporary New Labour machine, which regards socialists as an alien species which should not belong to the party.

Some of these tensions would eventually spread into TUC conferences. As early as 1887, the president opened the conference by arguing: "One thing is certain, this labour movement is the inevitable outcome of the present condition of capital and labour; and seeing that capital has used its position in the House of Commons so effectively for its own ends, is it not the strongest policy of labour now that it has voting strength to improve its surroundings?" This speech set the tone of a debate to set up a new workers’ party headed by the then young delegate, Kier Hardie, representing the Ayrshire miners in Scotland. But the idea was soon squashed by a series of delegates, who were Liberal Party members. They put forward the argument, often repeated, that a new party would split the Liberal vote and let the Tories in. The voters were not ready for a new party of labour and it would be much better to keep with the Liberal Party. Hardie was ferociously attacked by the Liberal MP, C Fenwick (delegate of the Northumberland miners), because he dared raise the anti-working class record of a Liberal parliamentary candidate recently supported by leading Liberal trade unionists at a by-election in Northwich.

The striking turning point

A CHANGE CAME in 1889, in what would later be seen as a turning point. This was the victory of newly organised trade unionists in the gas workers’ dispute, leading to the formation of the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labours. Later that same year came the London dock strike, which also saw the setting up of a new union. These disputes brought previously unorganised workers into the trade union movement, led by men who were socialists and who supported the demand for a new workers’ party.
By the 1893 TUC conference, one of these leaders, Ben Tillett, was moving a motion for a separate fund to support independent labour candidates and an elected committee to administer these funds. It included a worked out process to select candidates who pledged to support the policies of the trade unions. James MacDonald, later an early leader of the Labour Party, put forward an amendment, (passed by 137 votes to 97) calling for all such candidates to "support the principle of collective ownership and control of all the means of production and distribution". It was the first move in the creation of what would eventually become the Labour Party. But, in the manoeuvrings of the conference, Liberal Party members ensured that this resolution became a dead letter. This was signalled in the defeat of a further resolution by Hardie calling on labour members of parliament to sit in opposition to the Liberals.
Over the next few years, socialists and militant trade unionists attempted to put flesh on the bones of this resolution, while Liberal trade unionists attempted to block its effectiveness. A critical issue centred on finance. The Liberal Party trade unionists prevented the funds of the unions they controlled from being used to support working-class candidates standing independently of the Liberal Party. Unlike today, when MPs make themselves rich by gaining a parliamentary seat, being an MP was a non-paying job. Only the rich could afford to sit in parliament. So it was necessary for trade unions to find the money for the election campaign and to pay a salary should the candidate be elected. By blocking funds, the Liberal trade unionists could hold up the creation of a new workers’ party.

Equally, the Liberals curtailed further debate on this issue in the TUC, defeating resolutions and proposals at the 1894, 1895 and 1896 congresses. In 1895, the congress president, councillor Jenkins, a Liberal president of Cardiff trades council and a delegate from the Shipwrights’ Society, used his opening speech to carry out a full frontal attack on the Independent Labour Party (ILP) for standing candidates in the 1895 general election. He even attempted a slur that, because independent labour candidates undermined Liberal Party votes, the ILP was funded by the Tories.

Catalysts of change

BUT THE TIDE of history was about to turn against the Liberals. Conflict between labour and capital was intensifying as the economic upturn of the early 1890s took a dip towards the end of the decade. Additionally, British manufactures were experiencing sharpened competition from the expanding economies of the USA and Germany. As a squeeze on profits developed the bosses turned to reduce wages and attack the power of the trade union movement to defend its members’ interests. Although the Tories were in power, having won the 1895 and 1900 general elections, the Liberal Party was reluctant to commit itself to reversing the attacks on the labour movement. Many Liberal Party members were also employers, the very people carrying out some of these attacks.

At the same time, throughout the 1890s in one local area after another, small but determined groups of socialists were beginning to influence the organised movement, enabling them to replace Liberal trade unionists with socialist representatives in a few places. This activity by socialists on the ground, combined with the numerical growth of the new unions such as the gasworkers and dockers, helped to transform the situation. This process, alongside the alienation of some of the more traditional unions from the Liberal Party in the late 1890s, began shifting the ground of support within the TUC.

The eventual formation of what would become the Labour Party was not automatic. There was a dialectical relationship between the general economic forces creating conflict between labour and capital, the old and new unions, and the conscious intervention of socialists acting as a catalyst of change. As the famous phrase of Karl Marx states, "man makes his own history, although not in circumstances of his own choosing". But within this it is necessary that man does indeed ‘make his own history’.
Historians often cite two legal judgments as being critical in the development of the Labour Party: Taff Vale (1900-01), and Osborne (1909). Both were strident attacks on trade unions. In reality, these judgments rapidly increased a trend which was already underway, rather than sparked the creation of the Labour Party itself. Setting up the LRC had been agreed a year before the Taff Vale judgment, at the 1899 TUC conference. This laid the foundation for what would become the Labour Party, and brought to an end the period of the pre-birth of the new workers’ party.

The next two decades would see the growth and spread of the new party in working-class communities, reflected in unions, local councils and, increasingly, parliamentary seats. But, as with the previous decade, success would not be automatic. The working-class voter was still wedded to the habits of the past and remained attached to the capitalist Liberal Party. Many of the old Liberal trade unionists were still influential and continued to claim that the Liberal Party was the party for workers. They cited as evidence the fact that large numbers of workers still voted Liberal, mistaking voting habits for a zodiac sign determining the character of the party.

Looking back at this history of the Liberal Party, which by its policies and ideology supported the interests of capitalism, we might wonder how little has changed today. The New Labour government and Labour-controlled councils act like ruthless employers, affecting millions of public-sector workers, who have endured low pay, effective pay cuts through below inflation pay awards, alongside real and threatened job losses. Labour stands by as employers close down businesses and sack workers. At the same time, the government gives away billions of pounds to prop up the banks. Its stated intent is restoring the profits of firms while demanding that the working class picks up the bill. It is this context that poses once again the need for a party which can represent the interests of working-class people. Conscious socialists should be fighting to achieve this objective.

What's wrong with the CWI view?

Principally the idea that just some amorphous Old Labour Party will stand for the workers interests. This is a flat refusal to view the history of the LP without reformist glasses on. The following section is the most revealing:

'The eventual formation of what would become the Labour Party was not automatic. There was a dialectical relationship between the general economic forces creating conflict between labour and capital, the old and new unions, and the conscious intervention of socialists acting as a catalyst of change. As the famous phrase of Karl Marx states, "man makes his own history, although not in circumstances of his own choosing". But within this it is necessary that man does indeed ‘make his own history’.'

This caricature of Marxism - economic forces created class struggle, with a splash of socialist action=LP. The actual content of these three aspects are ignored. Was the economic depression vital to the formation of the LRC in 1900? I would say not. The trade union aristocrats who made up the trade union movement well into the 1920s and 30s were opportunistic as hell. They often supported Tories as well as Liberals, depending on who promised the best deal for the less than ten percent of workers employed in skilled trades. The fact British capitalism suffered a boom-depression in quick order perhaps speeded up the development of a third opportunistic trade union politics-the LP, but it was likely to occur anyway in Britain, given the diseased nature of the economy, and the intransigence of a ruling class which had no understanding of the necessity to realign the political economy along collaborationist lines, apart from the fringe 'Empire Socialism' of the Chamberlain wing of the Tory Party (interesting to note Chamberlain was a former Liberal). It is vital to view capitalism as a social system, not a crude agglomeration of economic functions or bland class relations.

The approach the SP tend to use when producing their regular series on why we need an Old Labour Party is economic determinism, which is so often trotted out (pardon the pun) in lieu of a real and sophisticated understanding of both Marxism and working class social and political history. It postulates that economic crisis = the unions realising they needed their own party, with the assistance of some socialists. The economic dis juncture is vital to this schema in masking the issue of who built the LP? It is a very different narrative if we actually attempt to answer that question: the LP was built by trade union leaders who had for generations sucked at the teet of racist and often genocidal British Imperialism so long as they got a good share of the milk. When this Imperialist class began to falter in their class rule, linked obviously to both the rise of essentially better Imperialisms, and also due to anti-colonial revolts, the unions had to defend these hard won gains. What were these gains? the tiny minority of unionists had much better wages than the average, had access to employer insurance schemes, better holiday pay etc (see Eric Hobsbawm, 'Laboring Men', particularly the chapter on the labor aristocracy in C19th Britian,). This was paid for out of the super profits leached from the toil of workers abroad via the dual mechanism of unequal exchange of manufactured vs. agricultural/raw material products, and the huge surplus on overseas investments (even today five X the national GDP). This was all covered in Lenin's Imperialism, and has yet to be bettered or rubbished as a basic outline of the roots of social imperialists parties of the Labour Type.

Problems of labourism

If the SP were to admit that a privileged section of the class built a party to continue to defend those privileges, the argument in favour of a warmed over version today would be slightly undermined. This is the reason for the bluster about the new unionism of the late 1880s. The fact these unions largely died a death, due in no small part to the outright hostility of the skilled unions to these uppity labourers and women workers, is ignored. Also ignored is any recognition that the much lauded 'pioneers' of socialism were in fact reformist/trade unionist type socialists, whose imprint on the LRC and the LP was that of a class collaborationist and social imperialist organisation. The SP can lambast the SDF and other Marxists for cocking up an intervention into the LRC movement from the 1890s onwards, but they cannot ignore the fact the LP was built by an aristocracy of labour, assisted by reformist socialists, and as a non fighting, Parliamentary force.

'Within its ranks were socialists, Marxists and reformists, such as those in the Fabian Society. The Labour Party in that sense became an arena within which the political arguments for socialism, and the differing policies and tactics to achieve it, were debated. It was seen by the working class as a tool with which it could fight for change, as a class.'

The sophistry of the above statement, perhaps unintended (I hope), is patently absurd given any serious reading of the history. It was not a working class party, not then, not in the 70s, and not now. The party was always bourgeois in program and leadership. Is it a surprise that the LP only became a mass force after the Russian revolution, when the fear of Bolshevism gave a fillip to the left turn on nationalisation, and an organisational impulse to out-organise the fledgling communist party? The rewriting of our history is a travesty. What about the multi million syndicalist movement of the late 1910s and run up to WW1, a struggle and movement the official unions and LP did everything they could to smash and undermine? Where is the analysis of how this wonderful party scabbed on the post WW1 revolutionary wave, the 1926 General Strike etc and etc. This is all ABC stuff. (See, James Hinton, Labour and Socialism: A History of the British Labour Movement, 1867-1974, particularly C.5, The Labour Unrest, 1910-1914, and C.7, Working Class organisation between the Wars)

This is not to say that the LP can be equated simply with its leadership, or that it was always a party of the aristocrats-the industrialisation and monopolization boom of the depression, WW2 and post war, gave a real foundation to the growth of mass trade unions amongst the unskilled, and through the unions, the LP. This is what created the extensive branch network, the trades councils (A.J. Reid, United We Stand: A History of Britain's Trade Unions, Part Four) and the necessity of communists to work to win the fighting base of the LP to a class struggle program and party, in the early period as well as up until the 90s.

Best book on this subject is Paul Allenders 'What's Wrong with Labour: A Critical History of the Labour Party in the C2Oth, Merlin Press, 2001) which charts the essence of labourism embodied in the LP. Labourism embodied in the LP amounted to a reformed capitalism, shorn of its roughest edges by elements of public ownership, welfare provision and progressive taxation. Even Labours 1918 Manifesto, Labour and the New Social Order makes explicit the commitment to capitalism. The CWI, as advocates of a militant reformism, cannot go beyond the framework of labourite parties wielding the capitalist state power in the name of socialism, hence the CWI position that socialism will come to Britain via a Parliamentary majority introducing an enabling act to nationalise the largest companies. The ideological power of reformism has bent many groups and individuals to its logic of class collaboration. The recent CWI leadership of xenophobic strikes, and the No2 EU chauvinist political party which flowed from this displays this in an almost chemically pure form. The more things change in the trade unions the more they seemed to stay the same, hence from Liberalism to Labourism; from labourism to...a new 'old labour'?

Latin American Workers in Unite: From heroes to pariahs

2009-11-21T07:07:00.000-08:00

Below is a statement from the Latin American Workers Association. In this bloggers opinion it explains the policing role the trade union bureacracies play in Britain today, and why our unions need to be extended to the unskilled and most exploited workers. In this broadening it is clear that union activists will not be able to rely on the support of the permanent officials, all too concerned to hold back militant struggles against the racist and anti-worker immigration laws passed by the Unite funded Labour Party.

In September 2009 Unite the union ordered the Latin American Workers Association (LAWAS) without notice to vacate the office which it had provided the Association with in its southeast region HQ in Manor House, thus ending a five year partnership. This followed an organised campaign by officials againt LAWAS, because of the latter´s support for an unofficial dispute and support for undocumented workers. But what was the background to this breakdown in the relationship, and the closure of this well known point of contact between latino workers and the trade union movement, and what is the future for LAWAS?

Firstly , some history. LAWAS was reformed in 2003 by Ernesto Leal, Julio Mayor and other Latin American workers in London, many of them political exiles and trade unionists in their own countries. It was in fact the second incarnation of the Association as the first version existed in the 1980s, which is a story for another day. The aim was to address directly the exploitation and abuses faced by Latin American workers in London, and to link these workers to the broader working class movement.

The new LAWAS operated out of cafes and park benches and temporarily in a community centre in Dalston, before being offered a more permanent home by various organisations including Unite (then the T&G), whose offer was accepted in mid-2004. Thus began the partnership. LAWAS was supported by Unite with office space and volunteer expenses, but maintained an independent existence and was never part of Unite´s democratic structures.

From its small room in Unite´s Manor House offices LAWAS combined advice and representation by workers for workers with a huge union recruitment drive, of which Unite was the main beneficiary with new members running into four figures, concentrated above all in contract cleaning. Word was spread through a publicity drive in the Latin American community taking in radio, newspapers, churches, embassies, public meetings and festivals like the annual Carnival – all of which are still key points of contact with the community. Email bulletins to the ever growing list of members and supporters became and still are a key tool of communication. Some coverage was achieved in British left media, but in the words of a Unite organizer assigned to working with LAWAS, its work was largely ´under the radar´ of the union. The response of the community was overwhelming, and LAWAS became known colloquially ín the community as the ´sindicato latino´.

At the same time the Justice for Cleaners (J4C) campaign was getting into gear and LAWAS´s efforts fed into that, as a majority of the workers who approached LAWAS worked in this sector. A good working relationship was developed with individual J4C organisers and activists in activities which ranged from English classes to organizing buildings, and in general promoting J4C in the Latin American community. Indeed LAWAS´s first office volunteer, Jose Vallejo, was reruited within a year by J4C. IN 2007 the J4C organisers branch made a sizeable donation to LAWAS in recognition of its support, especially in union recognition fights and organising the first ´papers for all´march. On the surface LAWAS was a success story which the T&G/Unite was happy to sell and did so, both inside and outside the union.

However, for the many latino cleaners who joined Unite but did not work in the buildings targetted by J4C it was almost impossible to take part in their new union. Lacking a functional branch, LAWAS became their de facto ´branch´, but this put LAWAS under an intolerable strain as it lacked the normal facilities of a branch, and because the union often would not assist when collective issues and organising opportunities presented themselves: the National Physical Laboratory and the BBC being just two examples. Where possible these workers and LAWAS did what they could alone. But without organisational backup this was difficult. It often felt like LAWAS was just there to increase membership numbers and take the strain alone of new members with all their problems.

In these circumstances LAWAS made it a priority to educate its new union members. For a long time it was unable to get serious union support despite repeated efforts, so it organised its own English and workplace rights classes, both alone and in conjunction with the College of North East London (CONEL) and the London Coalition Against Poverty - activities which continue to this day. Finally, thanks to pressure from both LAWAS and key J4C organisers, Unite arranged a piot English course. LAWAS made this possible by supplying a professional volunteer teacher and enough students to make the pilot project such a success that a large scale programme of education in basic skills was then laid on for cleaners. This programme is now a major showpiece of Unite´s educational work.

A similar process happened when a pilot immigration law course were arranged by the Migrant Rights Network for Unite activists following immigration raids. LAWAS drew on its pol of Latin American activists to provide half the students and interpreting for the Spanish speakers. Again, the success of the pilot course led to it being invested in and rolled out nationally.

Links were also forged with the hospitality and domestic workers branches of T&G/Unite; with a host of Latin American solidarity and community groups which evolved into the Coordinadora Latinoamericana; and with other unions such as the CWU and RMT, and TUC initiatives such as the Vulnerable Workers Project. Joint Employment Tribunal work was carried out with community law centres in cases where union lawyers or officers had failed to support members, on one well known ocasion because they didn´t grasp the legal issues facing migrant workers This was not just an issue with Unite.

In 2008 LAWAS gave unconditional support to a number of inspiring cleaners´ campaigns both inside and outside J4C. A public meeting in Elephant and Castle at the end of the year organised by LAWAS and other groups brought together a number of these previously isolated campaigns. A grassroots reinstatement campaign for 5 Colombian cleaners sacked for circulating a leaflet at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) was in full swing, and was important as the first recent example of a campaign driven by Latin American workers. Those workers as well as others from Schroders Bank, and SOAS spoke of their experiences in struggle. Some raised criticisms of the ways union officials had handled their disputes. But as the Bolivian UCU activist who chaired the meeting stated at the end “despite the criticisms we are not anti union, because we are the union”.

The issue of immigration checks and raids was a constant theme at the meeting, as a means by which companies and the government itself were intimidating workers who organised. Unite Regional Industrial Organizer (Jose Vallejo) turned up to make the case for supporting the Strangers into Citizens campaign for a limited amnesty, while the majority present advocated a ´papers for all´ position which would not preclude critical support for the upcoming Strangers into Citizens march. Shortly afterwards his boss, regional secretary Steve Hart, in a sign of things to come, warned one of the sacked NPL cleaners that their campaign was being backed by ´extreme groups´. Needless to say, Unite made no effort to support the NPL cleaners campaign beyond the strictly and legally necessary, despite pickets taking place within walking distance of their national headquarters. Was this related to the fact that one of the cleaners main grievances before being sacked had been the use of an immigration raid to break their incipient organisation?

In 2009 official indifference turned into extreme hostility triggered by two issues: LAWAS´s support for sacked cleaners at the Willis building in the City of London, and its ongoing committment to a full regularization of undocumented workers.

In January 2009 a series of unofficial weekly protests by a shop steward and three workmates from the J4C campaign began, after they had been sacked by cleaning contractor Mitie at global insurance giant Willis in the City. The sackings were framed as redundancies after the company awarded the Living Wage but counter-attacked as elsewhere by drastically altering shift times, cutting personnel and smashing union organisation in the process. Union leaders argued they had done all they could and it was the workers fault a deal was not sealed. They disowned the protests, afraid of ´damaging the good relations with Mitie´, as one official put it. The workers felt let down and said so publcially after the union withdfrew all support. But from then on they concentrated their fire on the two companies, despite legal threats. Other cleaners flocked to the protests, including other ex Willis workers who had found work elsewhere but supported their colleagues´plight.

After four months LAWAS and the Coordinadora Latinoamericana forced a meeting with the Regional Industrial Organiser, in which the official pledged to try and open up a new space for negotiation with the employer, presumably making the most of the good unon-employer relationship to find four appropiate At the end as people packed up to leave, the official proposed a trade off for the support offered, whereby the Latin American groups supporting the Willis cleaners would support the May 4 march for a limted amnesty. Suspecting there was more to this, the groups present argued this was a separate issue and should be dealt with as such.

The offer of support was then quashed in a letter then sent by Assistant General Secretary Jack Dromey to the cleaners involved, which reiterated that no support would be given and making no mentin of the aforementioned meeting. In response to this a petition with four hundred signatures of trade unionists was raised at union and community events and branch meetings, and publically presented at Unite´s central office in Holborn. Among the signatories were dozens of union cleaners as well as as MPs John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn, and film director Ken Loach.

When the petition was presented those present were filmed and photographed by a sidekick of the regional industrial organizer, until he was confronted and stopped from doing so. This was the first sign of a vicious organised public campaign driven from the highest reaches of Unite, initially against the Willis cleaners and ultimately against LAWAS and indeed any critical voices. Leading the attack was the Regional Secretary supported by the likes of Women and Equalities Officer Teresa Mackay (ironic for a dispute involving mainly ethnic minority women) and their internal allies such as the Regional Industrial Organizer.

Unite officers went into overdrive to convince J4C branch committee members and the wider union, using highly confrontational language to suggest the workers involved were the main enemy: “people need to decide whose side they are on” wrote Hart in a briefing, contrasting the “mass of the cleaners” with “tiny groups seeking to undermine our united campaign”. And yet when Willis shop steward Edwin Pazmino presented himself as a candidate to the cleaners branch committee at its first ever elections, he gained a credible 29 out of 80 votes, despite never being informed of the meeting unlike other candidates, who were able to campaign beforehand. And if one thing characterised the Willis protests, and previous disputes led by Latin American workers, it was the solidarity of cleaners from different companies, as reported in the Morning Star throughout the long course of the dispute.

A leaflet was produced in the name of Justice for Cleaners and distributed by officers, despite not being approved by the new branch committee and certainly not its Latin American cleaner members, who along with many ordinary members almost unanimously supported the Willis cleaners. The leaflet trumpeted J4C´s successes in organising and education. This was ironic, because it was people like the Willis cleaners, and their supporters in LAWAS and elsewhere who had done so much over the years to create these successes in the first place. Instead fellow official and Regional Industrial Organizer Jose Vallejo was lauded to the point of featuring a colour photo of him on the leaflet, along with members of a youth group hired to wave Justice for Cleaners flags. The ´four cleaners and their handful of supporters´ were described as leading a ´scurrilous campaign´ which did not have the support of the majority of branch members – an allegation contradicted by the support actually received.

In another incident, a Unite branch which tried to speak about the dispute was silenced at a regional meeting of the ´United Left´ faction of Unite, to the disgust of many of those present. At a public meeting later organised by the Labour Representation Committee, fellow trade unionists from Unite, Unison and RMT proposed mediation in the presence of Unite officials, amnd suported by speakers John McDonnell MP and NUJ president Jeremy Dear. The proposal was ignored.

Why the ferocity of the attacks? This was not the first time union members had criticized official positions, held unofficial protests or presented a petition. The problem was that Justice for Cleaners was a flagship campaign controlled from the very top since its inception, and image meant everything. While criticisms and unofficial actions were had to be tolerated in sections of the union with a longer history, this new campaign had to be tightly controlled, and if that meant crushing internal dissent by any means necessary, then so be it. They chose to forget the basic point that it is workers who make campaigns, not officials, and sometimes, unfortunately, workers will take their own initiative and also be critical.

The other issue which Unite could not tolerate was LAWAS´s support for papers for all undocumented workers. Only two years previously LAWAS had worked closely with J4C organisers on this basis. Now however the official position had changed and dissenting voices again could not be tolerated. On the May 4 amnesty march organised by the Strangers into Citizens, LAWAS and other groups in the Coordinadora raised the slogans of ´noone is illegal´and ´papers for all´. Incidentally among these other groups were the UK branch of Colombia´s main opposition party (Polo Democratico) and the main Bolivian and Ecuadorian community groups mobilizing diaspora support for left wing governments in their countries - MERU and Bolivia Solidarity Campaign). Hardly extremists!

In May LAWAS representative Miguel Puerto asked to meet the Regional Secretary Steve Hart in order to find a solution to the Willis dispute. Instead he was met in worst company management style by not one but three officials including Hart, who instead of entering into a positive dialogue launched an all out attack on LAWAS for its support for the Willis cleaners and its behaviour on the amnesty march.

Worse was to follow. Around the same time LAWAS and J4C activist Alberto Durango was arrested in a trap sprung by his employer Lancaster, a tactic used on other migrant workers previously. They were unhappy with his recent activism at the bank. But police and UKBA officials also asked him about his employment at Willis – despite the fact he didn´t work there. But Durango and Schroders cleaners´ public support for the Willis dispute made them think he did. This raised the spectre of a blacklist among cleaning companies. Durango was freed without charges and dismissed. And yet when a picket was held outside the appeal against his dismissal, at which he was represented by a Unite lay representative, his union reacted by ordering an ´ínvestigation´ into him and, on Vallejo´s orders, refusing him access to educational courses! Six months later there has been no result of this mysterious investigation, nor a lifting of the ban.

Vallejo then went further by claiming at the cleaners branch committee that those involved in cross-union protests against recent immigration raids at both the Willis building and SOAS (University of London), were being sponsored by the cleaning companies themselves. Apparently other unions (Unison and RMT) were “approaching and dealing with the companies before organising their members” and that

“the so-called Cleaners for Justice called the members to disobey and as a consequence some were arrested facing deportation. We should ten [sic] have every reason to believe that the organisers of this campaign, Cleaners for Justice are paid by the Cleaning Bosses to attack the cleaners.”

It should be noted that Cleaners for Justice has never existed beyond being a slogan used by sacked Unite cleaners to express their desire for a cross-union cleaners campaign, with the workers themselves in the driving seat. This is an ideal which LAWAS has always supported, in place of the foolish competition which led, for example, to Unite not supporting cleaners strikes on the underground in 2008 but then publically claiming the credit for the successes of the strikes while offering no solidarity to those victimised through immigration arrests and the like as as a result.

Unite then moved to force LAWAS out of its office. At the start of the year he had presented a relative of his to LAWAS as a new office volunteer. LAWAS accepted in good faith. But it soon became clear that this relative wanted nothing to do with LAWAS and instead was there to act as Vallejo´s personal secretary. LAWAS then put forward a new volunteer of its own, as had always been the custom, but was prevented from doing so by the Regional Secretary. Instead the family member came to work an increasing number of days in the office. Volunteers were paid ´loss of earnings´ at aorund $65.00 a day once they had completed some basic training, but the monies paid to her were never revealed by the union despite requests by LAWAS. This stood in complete contrast to the rule enforced by Unite officials for five years whereby volunteers had to sign one and the same weekly expenses form for each day of work.

LAWAS held off by making a public statement about all of the above so as not to prejudice Juan Carlos Piedra, a LAWAS and J4C activist who after intense pressure from many quarters had succeeded in getting Unite representation after being sacked for union activity from his job at University College London. Instead LAWAS sought as always to resolve its problems with Unite by requesting another meeting with the Regional Secretary, and was about to do so but was pre-empted. Firstly, Vallejo took control of the volunteer rota on the basis that LAWAS had been advising workers to join other unions. A ridiculous allegation, because workers simply been advised in LAWA´s bulletins to join the union which corresponded to their workplace or occupation – as previously instructed by Unite officials! Still, LAWAS continued publicizing Unite and recruiting into it far more than into any other union. A week later regional secretary Steve Hart, sensing perhaps that a scandal might be on the cards, ordered LAWAS out of its office without notice. Even after that move a meeting was requested to address the situation, but to no avail.

And so an era has ended. But despite the problems, the last year has been a very positive one for LAWAS. The campaigns it supported breathed new life into the organisation and won it many friends across different unions and in the Latin American community. As a result the annual assembly held in August 2009 was the largest ever and a new committee was elected which for the first time represented almost all the main Latin American nationalities resident in London. With its new temporary premises in the National Union of Journalists, it is up to that committee and all Latin American workers to secure the future. This means fighting inside unions, including Unite, so they are led by the members, and joining with workers of al nationalities and backgrounds in doing so. It means working with those officials who are not corrupt and self-serving, and unmasking those who are. And it means recognising the achievements of struggles, but also preserving the right to criticize aspects of these and act independently when necessary.

RMT leadership must put action where their platitudes are

2009-11-16T07:52:00.000-08:00

TUBE AND TfL union RMT will be holding a demonstration in support of London Underground cleaners fight against privatisation this Wednesday (18 November) as it emerged that senior TfL bosses have received a 50% increase in bonus payments over the past two years from £3.6 million in 2007 to £5.3 million this year.

The tube cleaners, who are also fighting for TfL Chair Boris Johnson’s London Living Wage, will be outside the former Metronet headquarters at Templar House, 81-87 High Holborn at 12 noon on Wednesday 18th November.

RMT is demanding that all tube cleaning services should be brought back in house on decent wages and terms and conditions with the cleaners recognised as an integral part of the London Underground team rather than a soft touch for cuts and exploitation.

In a separate part of RMT’s campaign for Cleaners Justice the union has attacked the private company Advance – who clean train trains for Southern running out of London Bridge and Victoria – for slashing staffing levels in order to prop up their profits. RMT is warning that the cleaning cuts will leave trains dirty on these important London commuter services.

Bob Crow, RMT General Secretary said:

“The continued attacks on tube cleaners, and on the staff working for Advance on Southern, show that senior tube and rail managers, and the Mayor himself, are prepared to turn a blind eye while those doing the dirtiest jobs on the lowest pay are kicked from pillar to post. That’s a disgrace.

“Londoners should not tolerate a situation where TfL bosses get a 50% increase in bonuses over the past two years while some of their own cleaners on the tube are denied the Mayor’s London Living Wage and are forced to endure the uncertainty of repeated privatisation.

“RMT’s fight for justice for cleaners on our transport system will continue to put this issue right in front of the Mayor and the senior bosses who have the power to stop this exploitation.”

This is an absolutely crucial fightback by some of the most exploted workers in Britain. Largely immigrant and working at night, the mostly female cleaning teams have to literally run the course of their cleaning routes to make the quotas. The action by the RMT comes after occupations at the School of Oriental and African Studies in support of a victimized migrant cleaner over the summer. The movement to defend and extend union rights and organisation across the often illegal worker dominated cleaning industry is one the official union movement is finally getting behind, with Unite also backing the campaign.

However, the failure of the unions to fight effectively for their members on the low pay grades is clear from the above press release, which makes clear the shocking reality that unions have not even won the London Living Wage for their members yet! This minumum, raised in May by london Mayor Boris Johnson, estblishes £7.60 as the base wage for all Londoners, in theory. The reality is that 47% of part time (heavily biased against women) and 15% of full time workers are still paid below the London minumum (The Guardian,Friday 22nd May, 2009)

The failure to secure a wage that even the viciously anti working class Mayor of London increased, does not bode well for the fight for better pay and conditions for cleaners beyond that still poverty line level. The question could be asked of why no industrial action to force the minum wage for cleaners as a base from which to fight for a standard RMT rate for all jobs? The answer is that Crow, Woodley and co, despite the different degrees of militancy in taking action to defend trade unionists who are considered 'core' union members-permanaent workers in stable and relatively secure jobs-are both united in their commitment to not fighting with the same militancy for those considered a lot of effort-migrants, women, the lower paid who are more transient and less likely to stay in the same workplace and union for a long period of time, i.e. the people who most need militant and fighting trade union oganisations and leaders.

Crow has form for failing to actually fight for the low paid and vulnerable. As Workers Fight stated: "In late 2008 when bus and train company National Express announced 750 job cuts in December and proceeded to outline cuts in its East Coast Mainline and East Anglia train services along with job cuts (on the East Coast Mainline, 18% of the on-train catering workforce, for instance), the union delegates to the company council were able to claim that there would not even be any need for voluntary redundancies at some depots - because in fact the company had been topping up its low staffing levels with agency temps, all along. And it was "only" these agency workers who stood to lose their jobs. Of course these workers are not entitled to any statutory notice period nor redundancy pay unless they have been with the company in unbroken employment for two years, which is not the case.
This, basically, is how many companies are at present getting away with murdering jobs with impunity, while union bureaucrats boast of having prevented compulsory redundancies!(Workers Fight, 'Britain - The social crisis and the union leaders' response', In Class Struggle, #82, Jan-Feb 2009)

What we have is a lot of talk and bluster. We have a campaign. We get zero industrial action! If Crow was to build and argue for strikes across the rail and Bus netowrk to support these demands for the London living wage and better conditions for thousands of workers, then this would be real action, not mere waffling and platitudes. This will not happen without massive pressure on Crow and the RMT leadership. It will also not happen without the creation of a strong communist caucus withn the RMT ranks. Such a caucus would make the case for strike action to defend and extend the pay of cleaners, whilst arguing for a grading system to level up the wages fo all RMT members to the level of the highly paid drivers. This would win the support of the station workers, who have pay grades far below that of the drivers on the underground. The National Shop Stewards Network, although compromised by the patronage of the Crow leadership and the perspective of building it as a cheerleading force for lefty union tops by the dominant force in the newtwork, the Socialist Party, does have space for a real communists to fight for a perspective of communist renewal of the compromised union leadership.

Demonstrations, petitions and lobbying MPs is all well and good so far as it goes. If Bob Crow is serious about winning justice for cleaning workers then strike action across the rail network would surely be a start. An end to the excuse of work being outsourced as a cause of poverty pay must be exposed. RMT train drivers recieve some of the highest wages in the industry despite the outsourcing of their jobs. They do this because their union leadership have made the effort, or been forced to make that effort, on behalf of the heavily unionised sectors of the rail network inherited from the British Rail days. Stop the excuses. Fight for a levelling up of all low paid workers in the rail industry now!

The Socialist Party: the story of its capitulation to nationalism-Workers Power 336, June 2009

2009-06-08T12:23:00.000-07:00

In February and March of this year wildcat strikes spread rapidly across the construction industry, protesting against this use of migrant labour at the Lindsey Oil Refinery and demanding ‘British jobs for British workers’. How did the left respond to this outbreak of chauvinism in the labour movement? While some groups and activists took a principled stance, the Socialist Party supported the strikes, played down their nationalist goals, and was even in the leadership of the movement at Lindsey. Here, Chris Brennan, who left the Socialist Party over the issue, looks at how the organisation provided left cover for a movement whose goals were chauvinist to the core.

Over the last decade, the main establishment parties have been steadily escalating their campaign against asylum seekers and migrant workers, in a cynical attempt to avoid being outflanked by the parties of the far right, UKIP and the fascist British National Party (BNP). The Tories have attacked immigrants for everything from the lack of affordable homes to an undermining of British values, while Labour’s best known attack was made by none other than Gordon Brown with his now infamous pledge of 'British Jobs for British Workers' (BJ4BW). This nationalistic rhetoric has found resonance in sections of the trade union bureaucracy. Derek Simpson, for example, leader of the Amicus section of Britain's largest union, Unite, notably posed with page three models in the viciously racist and anti immigrant Daily Star under the banner of BJ4BW.

The reason ‘labour lieutenants of capital’ like Simpson make these arguments is that it costs nothing to blame another section of workers, like migrants, in comparison to the pressures and risks that working class struggle – addressing the needs of all workers – involves. Simpson can oversee 850 jobs destroyed by BMW at their Cowley plant without lifting a finger, as part of his strategy of securing an alliance with British bosses by way of requests for the government to defend ‘British manufacturing’ and ‘British jobs’. This strategy not only violates basic internationalist principles – that we should unite with all workers regardless of their nationality – but also turns the trade unions into a pillar of support for the manufacturing bosses they should be fighting. It is also completely failing to protect jobs (as Jeremy Dewar points out on page 8) with unemployment in manufacturing skyrocketing, while official strike figures for the last six months have collapsed to a historically low level.

Those strikes that did take place in construction have, under Simpson’s influence but not his alone, targeted the wrong people: migrant workers, not the bosses. On 28 January over 1,000 construction workers downed tools at the Lindsey Oil Refinery in North Lincolnshire, in defiance of the anti union laws, which demand ballots and cooling off periods between strikes. Keith Gibson of the Socialist Party of England and Wales (SP) was elected to the strike committee and through him the SP came to play a leading role in the strike.

The SP’s newspaper The Socialist (1 Feb) gives us Gibson’s detailed insider’s account of the dispute and what led up to it. He states that the British contractor, Shaws, had lost the part of its contract at the Lindsey Oil Refinery (LOR) for work on a de-sulphurisation plant to an Italian company, IREM. Shaws notified its workforce in December that there would be lay-offs. Unite shop stewards were concerned that the National Agreement for the Engineering and Construction Industry (NAECI or the ‘blue book’) would not cover the new workers. This collective agreement lays down basic, shift and overtime pay rates, plus proficiency payments, travel and accommodation allowances, pension contributions, sickness and accident benefits, etc. The union demanded access to Italian workers for trade union representatives, negotiations proceeded and Gibson did not indicate that there was any breakdown due to a refusal by IREM management to agree to apply equivalent pay and conditions for the Italian workers.

Labour MP for Cleethorpes, Shona McIsaac, for one, confirmed the unions had been "happy" to negotiate with IREM before the strike broke out. She said, “I had a meeting shortly after Christmas at Lindsey. We knew about IREM having the contract and at that time the unions were happily negotiating with them over terms and conditions, including the Italian workers having a tea break...The unions also knew that IREM was planning to recruit British workers as part of the contract to work alongside the Italians – they knew there was no plan to exclude British workers... But when the unions took the deal to their members it was rejected and the unofficial walkout began. After that some union leaders started making claims about British workers' conditions being undercut by these contracts.”

So, the Italian workers were paid the same as British workers and did not undermine the collective national agreements. What was the basis of the strike then? Keith Gibson of the SP explains that, “...on Wednesday 28th January 2009, Shaws' workforce were told by the Stewards that IREM had stated they would not be employing British labour. The entire LOR workforce, from all subcontracting companies, met and voted unanimously to take immediate unofficial strike action.”

The strike started as soon as the stewards reported that British labour would not be employed and for that reason alone. This was the point at which Union Jacks and ‘British Jobs for British Workers’ placards began to be a visible presence on site. Shop steward Kenny Ward summed up the strike’s aim very clearly: “There are thousands in this country that are victims to this discrimination, this victimisation of the British worker.” The demand of the strike was for at least a parity of “one for one”, i.e. one British worker for each migrant employed. It is on that basis – the attempt to dump the costs of unemployment onto Italian workers, not British, French or Italian bosses – that no Marxist organisation worthy of the name could support the strike.

The Socialist Party’s defence

The SP justified their support for the strikes for two principal reasons. The first was the undermining of the national union agreement. As The Socialist stated on 4 February ('Firm strike leadership gains results'): “… fundamentally this struggle is aimed against the 'race to the bottom', at maintaining trade union-organised conditions and wages on these huge building sites.” But, as we have shown above, this has no basis in fact. The second, more disgraceful, argument put forward by the SP is that the strike was about 'fairness' and against the exclusion of 'local labour'. Let us quote the SP leaflet put out as the nationalist demonstrations spread across the North and the Midlands: “This worker solidarity is against the ‘conscious blacking’ of British construction workers by company bosses who refuse to recruit skilled British labour in the U.K.”

This simply apes Unite leader Derek Simpson, who told the BBC: “It will occur again, and I'm sure it will occur in other countries as well unless there's a realisation that you can't just use the freedom of labour to the exclusion of indigenous labour.” To base a strategy for resisting job losses and unemployment on a nationalist appeal for preference, as this is what talk of 'local labour' means in practice, is to concede to the idea, put forward day in day out in the tabloids and by the pro-bosses political parties, that there are too many workers in the UK from abroad and that if somehow they were no longer here then jobs would be easier to come by. Yet this is another of the excuses offered by the SP to explain away their support for a thoroughly reactionary strike.

Economism

The outcome of Lindsey was a defeat for the working class. The 4 February settlement saw 104 of 195 jobs go to British workers. This followed the rejection of an offer of 25% of the jobs for British workers the previous day. Bernard McAuley, Unite’s chief negotiator, told the Guardian: “We've made sure that no Italians have been made redundant, we've got jobs for 102 British people.” While no Italian or Portuguese workers already on site were made redundant, the jobs were reallocated from those that had already gone to contracted IREM workers. Only around 100 of the projected 300 were already working at the refinery. The SP, however, maintained that the strike was “…an inspirational struggle against the 'race to the bottom'... Not since the heady days of the 1970s and 1980s was there a strike wave like it. The result of the strike was a massive victory for those who took part and it gave heart to tens of thousands of others who saw that it is possible to fight back against the growing threat of unemployment.”

This wholly exaggerated assessment of the strike wave reveals that the SP adopted a highly economistic approach to the strike. Treating it just as a trade union dispute, with a section of trade unionised workers defending their jobs and position, they failed to see the reactionary political significance of a strike against the use of foreign labour. While in the short term, this won a section of unionised workers 105 jobs, it did so only at the expense of another section of workers, and the reactionary content of the strike undermines the fighting position of the class as a whole. If we are divided along national and ethnic lines, we will never be able to fight in the interests of the whole class against the bosses, demanding jobs for all.

The position of the SP was a classic example of what Lenin called ‘economism’ or ‘tailism’. Lenin had attacked the Russian Marxists, ‘the economists’, who equated trade union consciousness with socialist consciousness. Lenin argued that the former would develop naturally owing to the conditions of capitalist society, which would create a spontaneous tendency for workers to pursue a struggle for higher wages, for better working conditions, and so on. Socialist consciousness was more than this though. Socialists saw the trade union struggle as only one part of a struggle against capitalism and for a new society based on the principle of working class power. Whereas there was a spontaneous tendency towards trade union consciousness, winning workers to socialism required a conscious struggle to raise their horizons beyond the limited confines of the economic struggle against this or that employer. To equate these two forms of consciousness would, in reality, mean limiting Marxist agitation to the struggle for the immediate improvement workers’ conditions alone – the conclusion ‘the economists’ in Russian Marxism drew. Opportunism was at the core of economism; rather than challenge the bourgeois prejudices of workers, the economists chose instead to tail their existing ideas, and adapting the socialist programme to what they would readily accept.

In the LOR strike the Socialist Party adopted this exact same method. Rather than putting forward a socialist and anticapitalist perspective, including defending the rights of migrant workers to take up their jobs, the SP capitulated to the existing, reactionary ideas of a set of workers. Ultimately, the SP failed to fight for jobs for all the workers – migrant and so-called ‘indigenous’. They simply lauded the scope and breadth of the struggle and called on it to spread further into a national protest movement. The strike had exposed a particular type of craft trade unionism, where a section of unionised workers defend their section interests, at the expense of other workers – denying, for example, jobs, social rights and entry into the workplace of migrants or less skilled labourers. The SP in classic economistic fashion mistook this craft trade union consciousness for socialist consciousness. Forgetting that socialists should not just be trade unionists, but, in accordance with our broader anticapitalist perspectives and goals, we should also be tribunes of the oppressed and marginalised, the SP were blind to the reactionary goals and implications of the strikes for ‘British jobs’, seeing them as simply trade union struggles and somehow intrinsically socialist because of this.

Opportunism
The SP went onto the offensive after being stung by criticism of the strikes from other socialists, notably Workers Power and the Socialist Workers Party. A set of demands were agreed by the strike committee in the heat of the strike at the behest of Keith Gibson and the SP on 2 February:

• No victimisation of workers taking solidarity action.
• All workers in the UK to be covered by the NAECI agreement.
• Union-controlled registering of unemployed and local skilled union members with nominating rights as work becomes available.
• Government and employer investment in proper training/apprenticeships for the new generation of construction workers. Fight for a future for young people.
• All immigrant labour to be unionised.
• Trade union assistance for immigrant workers, via interpreters, to give right of access to trade union advice – to promote active, integrated trade union members.
• Build links with construction trade unions on the continent.

These were certainly good trade union demands. The problem is that they were not the real aims of the strike and no wonder then that they did not form part of the agreement that ended the strike. Moreover, the seven demands evaded all mention of the central claim – more jobs for British workers on the contract – and neither did they contain any statement about what this would mean for IREM’s Italian workforce. This did not stop the SP going out of its way to downplay the central nationalist aims, concretised in the jobs settlement. Speaking of the nationalist manifestations at LOR the SP states “...But it seems that, since the strike, the SWP and some other groups on the left are doing their level best to undermine its achievements by focusing on the issue of 'British jobs for British workers' (BJ4BW).” Rather than answer the criticisms that union jacks and nationalism were prevalent throughout the strike, the SP have consistently claimed that LOR was, “a victory for the workers of all nations, won in spite of the EU-loaded dice and the anti-union laws,” which “set a benchmark not only for militant trade unionism but for the role of conscious socialist intervention”. Opposition to the strike was even dismissed by the SP as “….betraying a lack of imagination.” This much is true – it is indeed very imaginative to be able to contort 104 jobs stolen from Italian workers as in any way a blow against nationalism or a victory for the international working class!

Nationalist solidarity spreads
As mobs marched through Staythorpe in Nottinghamshire chanting, 'What do we want - Foreigners out; When do we want it – now!', the SP had this to say: “In the case of the Isle of Grain, and the Staythorpe site in Newark as well, the jobs were advertised in local job centres but not a single local worker applying for them ever got an interview…the jobs had already been filled by overseas contractors… It was a ruse by the bosses to get around equal opportunity employment laws, and everybody knew this. That is why there was so much anger, sometimes unfortunately and completely wrongly aimed at the overseas workers by a few.” This caveat, that the workers should not be openly nationalist, is a rather weak cover for the rest of the argument. As socialists we begin from the position that workers, regardless of nationality, have a right to work. This should and can be secured by a united struggle for jobs for all.

Peter Taaffe, General Secretary of the Socialist Party has condemned all those “on the fringes of the labour movement” who refused to support the strike wave. Perhaps he has forgotten his non-SP allies in PCS Left Unity. As Public and Commercial Services Union leader Mark Serwotka said, “British jobs for British workers is not only a reactionary slogan, it is potentially racist. I saw people on the TV saying, ‘I don’t want to work with those Eye-ties’ and hurling abuse at the ship where they were living. But I was the only trade union leader to publicly oppose the slogan.”

This reformist union leader displays a greater awareness of the dangers of nationalism than the alleged Marxists of the Socialist Party.

The Olympics Site: too many foreign workers?
On 8 May over 400 construction workers gathered outside the Olympics construction site in Stratford, East London. Lindsey workers led the demonstrations with Keith Gibson at the helm. Most were members of the GMB and Unite unions demanding a share of jobs for local workers. But there were also concerns about whether non-unionised labour was used on the site, and whether the national union agreement was bring observed. Many on the demonstrations also went to great lengths to deny media reports they were objecting to the use of migrant labour. But Keith Gibson said that "The protest is about the EU legislation with regards to social dumping of European workers throughout Europe in different parts of the country.” Neither GMB nor Unite support or ratify with evidence his further claim that, “They (the bosses) are not obeying the pay and conditions that the agreements will work under."

The bosses certainly denied non-union labour was being used. The Olympic Delivery manager told the BBC the issue on the Olympic site is not the union rates for skilled workers: “There are high levels of direct employment on the Olympic Park and we have a positive agreement with the unions representing construction workers on site which includes national wage rates.” Of course, bosses should never be believed. But the problem was that the unions organising the protests did not also represent workers on the site, and there was no attempt made to involve them in the protests. This could have quickly clarified the true picture: how much were they being paid and was this in accordance with existing national agreements? Again, the nationalist goal of the defence of ‘British jobs’ and against immigration appeared to be the chief concern of many protesters. Phil Willis of Unite stated, "The more skilled labour they bring in [to Britain] it's going to deny our apprentices because they won't need them." Again, here as elsewhere, the SP have not clarified the goals and aims of the strike but at best only exacerbated the confusion and failed to challenge chauvinistic prejudices behind the demand for ‘British jobs for British workers’.

South Hook strike – nationalism gets you 40 jobs
The apogee of this nationalist approach by sections of the working class was the 'victory' in Wales. Following unofficial strike action by workers and complaints from the GMB and Unite unions, the Dutch-based employer Hertel agreed to withdraw 40 Poles and replace them with UK staff at the terminal owned by ExxonMobil and Total at South Hook in South Wales. GMB stewards and officials did not challenge the bosses’ claim that Polish workers were on the union rates. This agreement followed threats by Paul Kenny, the demagogue leading the GMB union, that he would call other workers out on strike unless local workers were employed first.

Once again the SP echoed the demand for British workers to come first: “Workers at South Hook are not opposed to laggers from Poland getting work on the site as long as local laggers are given the opportunity of the work first under the union agreement and then foreign workers can be employed on the same pay and conditions.” (SP statement on 20 May)

What this strike wave has exemplified is the failure of the SP’s politics. No attempt was made to undermine Simpson by linking his nationalism to his inaction at Cowley and elsewhere. When the strike started, socialists had a duty to fight for a radically different perspective. In addition to the demands of the LOR strike committee, there should have been a condemnation of the slogan ‘British jobs, for British workers’ and a defence of the Italian workers’ right to take up their jobs at the plant. This could have given the strike an internationalist character, and sparked a militant movement for jobs for all. Socialists may well have lost the argument, but by taking a principled stand, and taking the internationalists arguments on to picket lines as the strike developed, we would have been in far stronger position for the future: for it would have the laid the basis for a stronger, more united, movement of all workers fighting mass unemployment. Not a movement divided along national lines, fighting amongst ourselves for a dwindling number of jobs.

Left Nationalism – No2EU

With the bosses’ system sinking into a deep recession and governments everywhere facing a crisis of legitimacy, the 4 June European Union elections offered an open door to a serious working class alternative. But the No2EU slate was not and could not have been that alternative. The decision by Bob Crow, General Secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union (RMT), to establish a new electoral alliance to contest the European elections is a direct continuation of the nationalist strike and demonstration movement in a political form. At a time of global economic crisis, when bosses across the world are attacking the working class, the No2EU platform chose to focus exclusively on the bosses in Europe, letting the British off the hook. Whilst some of its criticisms of the EU were correct – for example, the reactionary, anti-union judgements of the ECJ and its attacks on the neoliberal Lisbon Treaty – it not only ignored the fact that Britain has been, since Thatcher, in the ‘vanguard’ of neoliberal states, but also included calls to defend ‘British’ industry. This could be nothing less, given British industry is nearly wholly privately owned by capitalists, than a call for manufacturing workers to strike alliances with the very bosses who are sacking them.

When it comes to immigration, No 2 EU states that “To ferry workers across Europe to carry out jobs that local workers can be trained to perform is an environmental, economic and social nonsense.” As Natalie Sedley has highlighted, however, the “fact that workers from one European country can move to any other, can bring their dependent relatives with them, and, at least in theory, cannot be discriminated against in relation to “native” workers, is undoubtedly something progressive and beneficial that socialists and trade unionists ought to support.” (See ‘Viking, Laval and all that – are the arguments of No2EU justified?’ on www.fifthinternational.org).
The Socialist Party was quick to support No2EU and clearly hoped it could lay the basis for a new workers’ party. Clive Heemskerk of the SP wrote, “The Socialist Party supports and is part of the No2EU -Yes to Democracy coalition. We recognise that many problems, from the economic crisis to planet-threatening global warming, can only be solved at an international level. If society remains organised as it is today, on a capitalist basis, divided into competing nations, the prospects for humanity will be bleak indeed. Fundamental change is necessary, based on democratic public ownership of the major companies that dominate the globe. We need a socialist Europe, not a bosses' EU. Backing the trade union-initiated No2EU - Yes to Democracy campaign in June's election is the first step towards building a force that can unite with workers in Europe and across the world to fight for a better future.”(The Socialist, 15 April 2009)

This approach, describing in entirely normative terms (how something should be) what we would expect a fighting socialist party to look like, without acknowledging that the No2EU campaign makes no such internationalist or socialist arguments, shows both an enormous leap of political faith and a willingness to take a reactionary detour along the road to a mass workers’ party. The No2EU platform makes no mention of either socialism or the working class. Socialism is something not even implied by its very limited policies. This perhaps wouldn’t be a problem, if the Socialist Party was determined to fight for internationalist and socialist politics in the No2EU alliance, but, again, it was more concerned to provide left cover for nationalism than to actively challenge it.

At the same time, it has to be said, that the SP share, in their own politics, some of the wrong positions of No2EU – in particular, the confusion over the free movement of labour that is at the heart of the campaign. As Dave Nellist put it in a recent interview in the Weekly Worker, 21 May: “I’ve always believed that part of socialism is the right to live, work, love wherever you want to be. However, if you put a practical example in front of me, which is the IREM multinational at Lindsey, then I come down on the side of the strikers who want to enforce common trade union levels of pay and conditions on whoever works there – as opposed to the right of IREM to use the free movement of capital and labour to make the biggest possible profit.” So, rather than argue for the unionisation of workers entering the UK and for a trans-EU minimum wage and union agreements to be enforced by all European unions – the communist approach – Nellist ends up counter-posing the free movement of labour to the defence of trade union agreements.

The New Party
We must not make the error of seeing the Socialist Party, or its sister sections in the Committee for a Workers International, as one big morass of capitulators to nationalism. There has been opposition to the degeneration of the SP from within the SP itself. In South Wales, Socialist Party comrades have refused to hand out No2EU leaflets and have instead insisted that only SP leaflets are used in the campaign. This is a conscious effort on the part of a minority of SP members to limit the damage of nationalism by handing out the much better and less overtly nationalist SP leaflets. The question now at hand for those SP members who are rightly concerned with the capitulation to nationalism by their leadership is whether the new turn is simply an aberration or flows quite naturally from the politics and method of the SP.

If the No2 EU - Yes to Democracy alliance becomes a new party formation after the Euro elections then the SP have already abandoned any notion of fighting for it to abandon its nationalism and adopt a revolutionary socialist programme. Indeed, as was shown over recent years in their approach to their Campaign for a New Workers’ Party, they have always seen political accommodation to the reformist politics of sections of the trade union bureaucracy to create a new reformist party in the here and now as a precondition for any future development of a revolutionary party. Such schematism is, as Trotsky once said, “the lifeblood of opportunism”, for it results in the fight for revolutionary politics being put off to some unspecified point in the future where it will suddenly become ‘operable’. Of course, Marxists should unite with reformists to build a new party – and place no conditions or obstacles in the way of this unity – but we must also be clear from the outset that our aim is the speediest possible formation of a revolutionary communist party to lead both electoral campaigns and the class struggle in the streets and workplaces. This mans fighting for the new party to adopt a revolutionary programme from the outset, as this is the only way to ensure that the party will consistently represent the working class.

This is, indeed, a fundamental problem with the political tradition (often known as the ‘Militant’ or ‘Grant’ tradition, after its founder Ted Grant) from which the SP emerged in the 1990s. Grant founded the Militant Tendency as ‘entryists of a special type’ – the tactic of building up organisational influence without fighting openly for a revolutionary policy – in the Labour Party. This strategy was based upon Grant’s conviction that any great upsurge would result in an influx of the masses into their traditional political parties, where they would find the leadership of Militant who had been slowly preparing over many years, even decades. Even when Labour purged Militant in the 80s and 90s Grant still clung to this perspective, believing they had to remain in the party that workers would inevitably return to on mass at some point in the future.

The SP has broken with this tradition only superficially. While they don’t see the Labour Party as playing the role Grant envisaged for it, they now apportion essentially the same role for the new reformist workers’ party they hope to form with the trade union bureaucracy (a Labour Party mark II, in all but name). Grant once said “due to the process of struggle itself, the broad consciousness of the masses moves in the direction of socialism.” (Ted Grant, Militant’s British Perspective, 1979). This was always a one-sided generalisation that encapsulated the problem with his method. Grant failed to see that the class struggle only creates the potential for the development of socialist consciousness: it is active revolutionary intervention that realises the potential.

The LOR dispute provides negative confirmation of just this point. It reminds us that the trade union struggle creates both progressive and reactionary outbursts. If socialists are unable to provide internationalist leadership and are not willing, where necessary, to stand against the stream, then they will never be consistent and principled fighters for revolutionary politics. As the jobs massacre rips through the economy, as Labour lurches into its deepest political crisis in a generation, Marxists need a revolutionary strategy for the crisis. The opportunist and economistic method of the SP is incapable of developing this. It is these fundamental problems of method we urge all SP members, alarmed by the turn of the last period, to critically reassess.