By Carson Rainham
Due to the current pandemic, this piece in its original form was put on hold until it felt relevant again. We can reflect in this moment on Lenin’s belief that there are weeks that feel like decades, and decades where nothing happens and despite writing this in early March and feeling already too late to respond to Marcus Barnett’s contribution to Tribune it now feels like whole years have passed. However, this piece deals with the ways in which the capitalist state has atomised the Left, particularly as a product of neoliberalism, and so it feels apt now to think about how to organise as that same neoliberal ideology crumbles around us. Perhaps more so now the Labour leadership election is over and Corbynism has been definitively resigned to the annals of notable failures in a long tradition of notable failures for the Left.
In the 19th Century, Richard Wagner grew tired of the state of modern opera, a bourgeois art form that elevated music above the contrived drama it pretended to perform. He conceived of a totality in art, in which all aspects of an opera should be held with the same reverence, where the story, the costumes, the acting and the stage itself should be as magnificent as the music. It was this concept he called Gesamtkunstwerk, a synaesthetic experience that would consume the audience and construct a new magical reality.
On reading Marcus Barnett’s recent contribution to Tribune, Rebuilding the Red Bases, in which he argues for a return to the old socialist cultures built by the trade union movement before the advent of neoliberalism, I found myself disappointed by the subdued hauntological limitations of its vision. The piece yearns for a labour movement no longer in existence, with the express intention of securing political power for the Labour Party in the next election.
In opposition, I found myself conceptualising the notion of a ‘revolutionary gesamtkunstwerk’, a movement focused on challenging dominant capitalist ideologies through exposure to socialist organisation at every level of living, not merely replacing the old institutions that were phased out with redundant labour practices and geographical displacement of working class communities.
Barnett asserts ‘that if the Left wants to win, it should be of service to the people it aims to represent’ and commends Labour MP Alex Sobel’s desire for the Labour Party
“to rebuild a culture of ‘visible, practical, and helpful grassroots action’ in local areas. Referencing the largely-vanished unemployed centres that trade unionists established in areas where community livelihoods were being stolen by Thatcherism, Sobel advocates establishing Labour advice ‘hubs’ that can advocate for people struggling with benefits or housing issues, or can sort out a cooked meal for those who are struggling to afford one.”
But these visions of a non-revolutionary party movement seem to arrive at a question frequently arising but rarely, if ever, answered by the Left: at what point does serving the people intersect with the Big Society? We’ve said it before here at The Lever that food banks alone do not build class consciousness but, I will argue, the successes of the Big Society are in the neoliberal logic of replacing class struggle with voluntarism to the point that it is all we can imagine. Food banks become abstracted as a necessity by those who create and use them, and not understood as a contradiction of capitalism. Service in this sense becomes about what one can do for (or to) another, not how one can raise up others to do for themselves.
Barnett hearkens back to a ‘society within a society’ created by those in the British Labour movement who ‘recognised the need to engage and develop a socialist presence in all walks of life’ citing the ‘socialist pubs, clubs, associations, musical groups, sports facilities and so on that gave Labour’s internal culture a vivacity’. This is but a small part of what one might call a ‘revolutionary gesamtkunstwerk’; that is, a totalising revolutionary cultural movement built around the proletariat creating its own institutions in every conceivable arena. I don’t entirely disagree with Barnett here and have long advocated a socialist politics that focuses on art, culture, and the social space. But the difference between a presence everywhere and a gesamtkunstwerk is in the political motivations of the former whose disingenuous nature of building a culture to prop up a party does little, in actuality, for the class it seeks to represent.
A new labour movement would need to compete against and usurp the present institutions; be built by class-conscious workers; and develop a widespread grassroots movement capable of agitation towards and mobilisation during a revolutionary situation, cementing our position as the class of the future. In short, Barnett isn’t wrong to make this point, but one might argue that the working classes have become so atomised since the late 1970s that the British labour movement is no longer in a state in which it can retreat and convalesce within a period of five years; least so now as Labour inevitably shifts back to the centre with Keir Starmer as the new leader, no doubt likely to rehash the Third Way but with less success.
The energy poured into the Labour Party since 2015 by the radical and liberal Left felt necessary but only because it arose from the desperate state of the left wing politics in Britain which still lacks any semblance of political power or organisational method. Following on from the election then, the lesson we learn is not, as Barnett is suggesting, to rebuild a cultural socialist project framed around the securing the finite benefits of a capitalist social democracy and its welfare state.
The fragmentation of the British labour movement since Thatcher, and the Left’s response to this which has been defined over four decades by its propensity for reactive fire fighting and organising in small factions, culminated in a vision confined to Labour party socialism. This predictably hindered proletarian progress and ignored history’s lessons. We might refer to Lenin’s views of the British Labour Party that ring as true today, evidenced by five years of bourgeois MPs and key trade unionists (see: Len McCluskey) undermining Corbyn and corrupting progressive policies such as the free movement of people and Net Zero carbon emissions by 2030 in favour of jobs for British workers:
“[T]he Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers. ”
I would like to linger on Lenin for a moment to emphasise a point. It might be controversial to consider that following the successes of Thatcherism, British deindustrialisation and the obsolescence of the unions, the Left’s loss of political power was not attributable to an unsustained cultural movement but instead to a movement invested in social democracy and economism. This is something Lenin wrote extensively on in What is to be Done? over 70 years before:
“Revolutionary Social-Democracy has always included the struggle for reforms as part of its activities. But it utilises “economic” agitation for the purpose of presenting to the government, not only demands for all sorts of measures, but also (and primarily) the demand that it cease to be an autocratic government. Moreover, it considers it its duty to present this demand to the government on the basis, not of the economic struggle alone, but of all manifestations in general of public and political life. In a word, it subordinates the struggle for reforms, as the part to the whole, to the revolutionary struggle for freedom and for socialism.”
Ultimately the failures of the British Left were in the marriage to a Trotskyite tendency that focused on the fetishism of collective struggles on the factory floor as the sole site of struggle. As those factories disappeared so did the localised communities and socialist traditions within them, replaced instead with a new and prominent bourgeois individualism accelerated by the shift in property relations under Thatcher which accelerated the displacement of the poor through the selling off of council housing, creating a new generation of landlords to complement a burgeoning rentier class.
Barnett's vision then is predicated on an idea of a labour movement which does not and cannot exist. New movements must form around constellations of class, capital, and ideology. Work must be done to assess the conditions of the working classes, constantly re-theorising and organising out of these new surveys. Only with an understanding of the conditions of the working classes, including their own correct and incorrect interpretations of said conditions, can any sustainable movement be built. Instead of supplanting a ‘socialist presence’ modelled on archaic culture and voluntarism into communities, dedicated and trained organisers should be finding creative solutions to increase class struggle and put power into the hands of communities. This won’t be done with bike clubs and advice hubs. It is incorrect to believe that people will become convinced Labour Party socialists when you turn up at the door a decade too late to set up a pub, gym or men’s choir with socialist characteristics. It belittles the struggle for socialism, a class struggle, to one between the ways in which people relate to one another instead of how they relate to the means of production. Giving people more to do in the community might mitigate social unrest and alienation but it does not improve their labour relations or help the class to achieve political power. And from experience, more pubs (socialist or otherwise) does not equal more opportunities for a movement to grow.
Barnett is correct that the red base is necessary for a socialist mode of production to overcome its incumbent. However, the historical lessons of the British working classes are to be found in the absolute necessity of abandoning all bourgeois affiliations in any new revolutionary labour movement as well as romanticised notions of the socialist movement of the 20th century which was sustained by fundamentally different material conditions (an industrialised workforce fighting for their survival in abhorrent, dangerous conditions for example). Such a movement has to then cut adrift the lingering hope of an entrenched socialist Labour Party and its trade unions with their reactionary betrayal of internationalism and class struggle ecology. As a movement we have to forsake the idea that the successes of the past are timeless and reincarnating.
Of course, workers’ power in the labour struggle has to continue, and a new class-conscious trade union movement is necessary; one which is blossoming amongst tenants and sex workers and casualised and outsourced staff. (London Renter’s Union, ACORN, Sex workers union, IWGB et al) This would then make up another piece in the tapestry of the gesamtkunstwerk - fully democratised, localised organisations administrated by people who don’t represent bourgeois institutions in a paid capacity.
Forgive the allegory, but the Red Base does not need rebuilding like some Death Star with the same schematic weaknesses of the old. It needs reimagining entirely. Marx and Engels once told us that ‘in bourgeois society [...] the past dominates the present. In Communist society, the present dominates the past’. The revolutionary Left, which will be nothing if not committed to communist revolution, must start to build for a future that is almost too difficult to imagine. It should not be aiming for a ‘society within a society’ at all! Carving out socialist spaces within a capitalist society, and all its traditions, machinations and limitations, with the express intention of securing power for the Labour party is a defeatist and cynical vision of the future and one which does the work of the ruling classes for them.
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In 2010, David Cameron propounded his key strategist’s idea of The Big Society, a model of social solidarity which shifted the responsibility of the welfare state on to civic volunteers. Ideologically it sought to mitigate the onslaught of incoming neoliberal welfare reforms through a decentralisation of social responsibility onto local communities. Food banks, as an example, became ubiquitous throughout the UK where now starving locals, employed and unemployed alike, line up to receive donated tins of, usually cheap, food from volunteers. These projects, which expanded out of a social necessity (see: catastrophe), were subsequently celebrated by the Tory elite who pushed the idea that they were an exemplar of community spirit and self sufficiency, further justifying a pro-austerity agenda. As austerity rages on, the Left has compulsively acted to fill in the gaps and serve the people replicating the logic and fulfilling the roles invested in them by the state.
We have discussed the new movement of basebuilding in a previous article and its capacity to bring class struggle back to the level of the local, constellating with other bases nationally, and internationally, overseen by a centralised but democratic organisation. The Left needs architects of power using new schematics not withered blueprints. But to do this, there needs to be a totalising ideology that can be put into practice. Fred Hampton, revolutionary of the Black Panthers whose famous Free Breakfast for School Children fed hungry children in the neighbourhood, spoke of putting theory into practice:
“Any theory you get, practice it. And when you practice it you make some mistakes. When you make a mistake, you correct that theory, and then it will be corrected theory that will be able to be applied and used in any situation.”
The British Left in its current multitudinous and splintered iterations have no theoretical movement for power. Even the more successful of these iterations, isolated from the mass of people, are limited in their ability to provide more than just a contingency to the economic conditions of the poor working classes. Basebuilding, at least, provides a space to examine praxis, correct its mistakes, develop a correct theory and seek to import it elsewhere. This way serving the people connects with widespread political power through a democratic central hub of delegates from each group. In the United States, this model sees these basebuilding groups meet at the ‘Marxist Center’. And with a focus on creating a totalising socialism, basebuilding need not be limited to service that keeps the hungry fed for a day, nor to a small group of individuals compelled to right the wrongs of a broken system, but can extend outwards to every walk of life, far outside of the Labour Party.
This is of course not an argument against solidarity efforts that keep people alive, it’s about channeling these efforts into a formidable political movement inclusive of the joys of living.
It was refreshing then, amidst the chaos of the current pandemic to firstly not only see a huge uptake in solidarity driven ‘mutual aid groups’ rapidly spread across the UK and then internationally from a single small household of anarchists in a largely affected borough of South East London but secondly to see those organisers look towards self-criticism of the limitations and the possibilities of how a new movement might grow in a post-Coronavirus world.
In a piece by ‘Anna Kleist’ in Freedom this week the author, who set up the first Covid-19 mutual aid group, discusses how they themselves did not feel that what they were doing was in itself ‘a revolutionary act’ but that there was an already and soon to be oversubscribed need for vulnerable members of the community to be supported while in isolation. This single act has resulted in thousands of local volunteers from an array of different backgrounds ensuring that people in self isolation are fed, medicated, supported to feel less lonely, and ultimately surprised that other people in their community think that this is important.
The author lays out five points that can be summarised:
1: Mutual aid groups don’t disrupt the logic of capital due to the amount that involves shopping for locals and actually have found capital to, well, have capitalised on this through ‘volunteer cards’ making the job easier for volunteers.
2. Some groups have organised towards decommodification - preventing evictions, redistributing resources for free etc. This should be built upon.
3.Survival pending revolution is important and shouldn’t be dismissed by political puritanism.
4. The rapidity of organising of new mutual aid groups and the positive impact it has had on locals is not a direct challenge to capitalist structures but is even in such a short period of expansion one, out of very few, of the more effective products of the Left at present.
5. Mutual Aid groups require democratic structures, continuous self-criticism, and a commitment to patient organising that digs in deep with the very people we purport to want to see liberated, even if they’re not a part of a perfect (or any) political tendency.
These five points, even if not directly influenced by basebuilding as a method, seems to understand the necessity of such a set of organisations. More so, these groups are already doing it. Some mutual aid groups are more established, more effective than others. From my own brief smaller experiences in them I’ve seen a wealth of important information and guidance shared from group to group to build efficiency (and unfortunately some groups that make the easiest jobs harder for themselves).
“Anna Kleist” asks an important question about the future. What next?
Coronavirus has in such a small time frame washed away all of the illusions and abstractions of capitalism that have plagued class consciousness for so long. The free market does not provide and the state has had to intervene to keep idolatry of capital afloat. Shortages of ventilators and chemical agents for mass testing are resulting in larger numbers of deaths because ‘nobody asked us to produce more’. Workers forced to stay home are having to be bailed out by money that was always available despite the myths pedalled that there was 'no magic money tree' for the poor. People who were valued at zero by Priti Patel at the start of the year are now “essential workers”. The “economically inactive” (the elderly, the disabled) are strongarmed into Do Not Resuscitate orders and die. Everything we were told was a lie and it was all ideological. Now the dominant ideology is collapsing but while socialism is the correct and inevitable outcome of capitalist defeat, it is underutilised by those such as Barnett who would apparently rather commit to living a principled socialist life under capitalism.
A ‘socialist presence in all walks of life’ is not nearly enough. Class struggle requires the domination of one class over the other and creating socialist signifiers as a trajectory for volunteer labour upholds the status quo. The revolutionary gesamtkunstwerk however relies on the complete abrogation of the way in which we organise, who and what we deem to be important, how we engage in debate and discourse and the level to which we integrate that into everything we do. We have to completely reinvent ourselves, to expand like we have never done before, to move culture away from the underground and invest ourselves in a political marathon, whilst also trying to survive. The Labour party, limited by its relationship with capital, neither has the scope, the vision or the political consciousness in its ranks to achieve this. This has been proved to us time and time again.
I cannot predict that this current crisis, probably the most significant since the Second World War (even with a massive and co-ordinated effort from the ranks of the working classes) will be the one to destroy the current order. But it has, more effectively than the British Left has ever been able to, exposed it for its failures.
The revolutionary gesamtkunstwerk is a model for building a totalising revolution. Class consciousness is not a product of disingenuously recreating socialist traditions or struggling to reform capitalism to mitigate its contradictions. It requires a new political imaginary, driven by a unity in struggle to create a present which once and for all will dominate the past.