The 12th of December marked a devastating defeat in the General Election for the Labour Party. This election campaign can be seen as the culmination of the process of resurrection of the British left as a real political force which began with the 2010 student movement and subsequent anti-austerity movements. The scale of this defeat will require a great deal of examination - not just with regards to the strategies and tactics employed by the Labour Party during this election, but also to take into account the historical processes which lead us to this juncture.
One remarkable element of this election campaign was the unity of the competing factions of the ruling class against the Corbyn project. The argument between the two wings of capital over strategies for accumulation - represented by their position over the EU - was over. Corbyn's industrial strategy based on infrastructure investment was decisively rejected. Both the ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ wings of the British ruling class opted for an accumulation strategy based on the cannibalisation of the state and proletarianisation. Capital was unified, labour was divided.
On the morning of the 13th, the markets opened to great celebration, the pound was up against the dollar, the Corbyn threat had passed. Boris Johnson’s newly unified Conservative Party, backed by a newly unified capital, plan to implement not only their Brexit deal, but the most reactionary political programme in a generation.
We also saw the SNP win nearly all Scottish constituencies, and for the first time nationalists winning a majority of seats in the North of Ireland, hastening the breakup of the United Kingdom.
The left, defeated, now faces a discussion about strategy and tactics both within and without the Labour Party. The key question is: where do we go from here? The reactionaries see their opportunity, and we need to see a clear path ahead.
Against a 'Blue' Labour
In the wake of Labour’s election defeat, despite bringing in a greater percentage of votes than the considerably more centrist Miliband incarnation of the party, the narratives throughout the media are abound that there’s just no place for left-wing politics in Britain. Immediately ceding ground to the convenient narratives of the bourgeoisie are many so called revolutionary communists! Indeed many within our movement have been more than eager to fall behind the rhetoric of creating a ‘Blue’ Labour, an approach to socialism that maintains “socialist” economics while leaving every reactionary social tendency intact. That associates ‘liberalism’ with the oppressed struggle against their oppressors, and that it was marginalised people from London who lost this election for Labour.
This is both a strategy and a statement of intent. It is a strategy in that they imagine ceding ground to reaction, tailing behind the masses and indulging their worst impulses, will lead to an electoral victory for the Labour party.
But who is dramatically overrepresented in the poorest segments of the working class? Who has the most immediate material interest in vast systemic change? Who has made up large swathes of the grassroots organising that allowed Labour to get anywhere near as far as it did in such a relentlessly hostile political and media environment? Was it homophobes and racist or was it marginalised people, many of whom have been invested in radical politics since many of these ghouls were telling everyone we just have to compromise and support Blair to keep the Tories out?
We have never won a single thing from ceding ground to the forces of reaction. Not one.
This whole approach fails to address the profound changes in the makeup of the working class of this country. The movement of many ‘working class’ voters from the Labour Party was a product of decades of profound class struggle waged against the working class and their institutions. Centralised means of production have been replaced by disparate, low paid warehouse, call centre, care, and gig economy work. New forms of work create new forms of worker. And new workers can be made into new electorates. Shorn from centralised industrial production and the suppression of its attendant forms of working class organisation, the inherent conservatism of the 20th century labour movement is able to survive where a politics of solidarity dies. As a result, our class is more fragmented and diverse than ever before, and elements within it more prone to reaction. It is our task unify these fragments, not by tailing the reactionary elements, but by uniting the advanced, developing the intermediate, and winning over the backward.
It is unsurprising that a Brexit which wrapped itself in all the mainstays of political reaction directed at the working class by the media for decades won when all those same tropes were used to attack a newly left-wing Labour party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn. We cannot begin again by incorporating these tropes into our politics. As we have stated before, 'Fascism isn’t about the hearts of individuals, it is a strategy for taking state power...We must ask “what forces, institutions, and projects, whether political, social or economic, are attacked or promoted when certain words are uttered’ and most importantly, what class is leading this, and who stands to benefit.' The ideological system of reaction which produced this moment was sewn together over many years, by many different means, to manufacture support for the institutions of the imperialist British state and British capital. We can not turn this to our advantage without also pledging our support and ultimately furthering the aims of the British state and British capital. This may be an acceptable electoral strategy for the Labour Party (and indeed has been one for most of its existence), but it will never be one for those of us who seek the true liberation of working and oppressed people, and who seek to build a new society in the ruins of the old. This ideological system of reaction was brought in to service more feverishly in this election than at any other moment since the miners’ strike. The crucial lesson we must re-learn from this election is that any increase in the class struggle will be met with an increase in political repression.
We must ask ourselves who has more interest in building power to survive and fight back against the increasingly far right austerity and bigotry of the Conservatives, the crushing oppression of capitalism itself, than queer people who are brutally economically marginalised and overrepresented in the homeless population? Than disabled people who have been dying by the thousands under the boot of dehumanising cuts? Than Jews whose oppression has been made into a convenient political bludgeon? Than Muslims who have been dehumanised and scapegoated at every stage of the Brexit crisis? Than Roma who are facing new laws that will grant the state even greater powers to attack and rob them? Anyone who tells you that these people need to sit down and shut up is pitching you on the politics of uselessness. Class society intertwines with every axis of oppression, to be a revolutionary is to fight it on every front, not just the one that doesn’t challenge you to investigate your own bigotry.
The dire situation of austerity and increased proletarianisation will only grow over the next Conservative parliament, as will attendant attacks on the oppressed engineered to further divide our cause and out class. Indeed, this is largely what the architects of Brexit desire - an tax haven off the coast of Europe where workers, social, and environmental rights are crushed, and where resistance is scattered by the winds of reaction.
The ruling class, capital, and all their mouthpieces in the media have made their intervention. Where and how shall we make ours?
The Limits Of Electoralism
Many were disappointed by Labour’s loss, ourselves included. It would be disingenuous to take an oversimplified “All parties are equally bad because they’re all bourgeois” position, the reforms that Labour was aiming to implement would have given many vulnerable people in our society a substantial relief from the unyielding pressures of austerity. Many of us are stunted in our ability to educate and organise by spending most of our waking hours on survival, by not being able to afford to get around as public transport fares rise and rise and our wages stay the same. By enduring the damage to our physical and mental health as long hours and soaring rents take so much from us. It’s a wonder so many of us have anything left to give to the class struggle.
For these reasons we condemn no one for strategically participating in the electoral process. However it is more stark than ever that the class solidarity of the bourgeoisie is too significant a force to defeat on a battlefield in which they set all the rules, and hold all the cards. We must look beyond reform and ask what we can do to counteract the struggles described above. Can we run programs that help meet people’s basic needs so they can spend less time surviving and more time building? Can we educate each other effectively so that the unaffordability of university does not hinder our class’ drive to grow, learn, and flourish?
With these efforts, we must go further than we have before. Food Banks alone do not create class consciousness. Providing basic needs, when not coupled with political intervention, leadership, and most importantly, appropriate organisational structure, creates passive political subjects. Central to these efforts must be the production - through confrontation with capital and the state - new, active political subjects who are able to take action on their own behalf.
If you can imagine a world beyond capitalism. If you can imagine a world where we control our own destiny, the answer to those questions has to be yes. Imagine if even half the resources, time, and energy invested in the electoral process throughout the frequent elections these past few years was put towards those ends instead. Towards things that a Tory victory can’t undo.
This is not an argument for a mass exodus from the Labour Party. Ever since our projects inception, we have maintained the necessity of work both within and without the Labour Party, with a focus on extra-parliamentary organisation.
The mass movement which has grown within the Labour Party cannot be allowed to fragment, either through internal division or through repression and expulsion of the left by the right of the party seen in the 80s. The election drew the collective energies of thousands, and produced a platform which encompassed the dreams of many. We must also note that (bar from a few notable exceptions) the energy of the new movement around Corbyn has been directed solely at maintaining Corbyn’s leadership against attacks from the media and the right wing of the party through the parties institutions, whilst also dealing with the moderating effects of the large unions on policy and internal democratic structures. Whilst the gains made within the party cannot be lost, there must be a strategy to consolidate and remove the institutional blocks and ‘moderating’ influences which only seek to keep the movement divided. Now is not the time for capitulation to ‘moderation’ on any front. The Conservative Party has thrown away moderation, capital calls for an end to any ‘moderation’ shown in the years of austerity. The newly unified forces of reaction intend to wage a class war sharper and more open than before. We must meet them in kind.
Our task now, is not to let the dreams of emancipation which fuelled the Corbyn movement wither in defeat. We must steel ourselves, and divert these energies into building real counter-power, into long term revolutionary institutions, to re-build a base for an emancipatory politics, and one that can be lead into a revolutionary confrontation with the current system.
We are not alone. Across the world, in countries such as Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, India, Kurdistan, Turkey, and many others, the masses are confronting the capitalist-imperialist system and sweeping reaction in their own social contexts. Bringing unity through common struggle here is but one part of building unity with the working and oppressed people of the world. The cause of liberation has suffered many setbacks. On the eve of the Great War, one of the greatest defeats our movement has ever known, no one knew that already historical forces had been unleashed which would lead to our historic victory in 1917. We may have lost, but we have never been vanquished and we have but a world to win.
- The Lever Editorial Group