By Andy Lark
“The sources of hope on the socialist Left in the past decade — from Syriza and Podemos to Corbyn and Bernie Sanders — have come through engagement in mass party politics. Before this, many years of focus on street movements and minoritarian radicalism had failed to grow our ranks or proliferate our ideas. Socialists should remember this, and stay in the Labour Party despite today’s disappointment.”
Ronan Burtenshaw, laying out his case in Tribune, has illustrated the most convincing argument as yet for why socialists should remain in the Labour Party, following the defeat of Corbynism and the return to power by the right. The above quotation highlights the crux of the issue. By ‘socialists’, both I and Burtenshaw mean those who desire an end to the capitalist mode of production and its replacement with a system based on democratic control by the working class over economic, social and political life. Other arguments, made less coherently, have often been based in a crude sentimentalism which fetishises the Labour Party and its place in working class history. The emotional attachment that members hold to an organisation - one that gives them a sense of meaning and social relationships in which they value, important as they may be - is not a sufficient justification for keeping their membership cards if they consider themselves principled socialists. Burtenshaw bases his case on the strategic superiority of the Labour Party as the vehicle for socialist politics in Britain and it is this argument that must be addressed and criticised.
Firstly, when Burtenshaw speaks of ‘mass party politics’ he is referring to a politics based on electoralism as its primary mode of operation. On this point, there is a certain truth to his claims of success. Electoral politics does have a unique advantage in the neoliberal era when it comes to organising political action on a mass scale as we have seen with the examples given above. The fateful decision by certain right-wing Labour MPs to lend Jeremy Corbyn their nominations in 2015, therefore putting him onto the leadership ballot in the hope of seeing the left trounced, gave expression to the deep disillusionment of hundreds of thousands of people - both within the Party and without - for timid centrism and austerity politics. It drew in activists who had been involved in extra-parliamentary politics of all dispositions from the trotskyite/leninist sects to anarchist and autonomist groups, as well as those who had never been politically active before. This was, on its own terms, a significant achievement. The Labour Party today can boast a membership of roughly half a million, larger than any other party in Western Europe. Furthermore, though its electoral base has now collapsed, the Party dominates the youth vote with 56% of 18-24 year olds voting Labour in December according to YouGov. A mass movement, however weak it may be, does exist attached to the Labour Party. No such movement based on class politics exists anywhere else in Britain. Burtenshaw’s point is that at such a crucial time of crisis, it would be a disaster to abandon this position of relative strength for that which hasn’t been able to demonstrate anything close to the same level of success.
However, this needs to be contextualised with an analysis of history. Is this not the function of social democracy, to divert the anger of the masses into bourgeois electoralism, where it can be neutralised in the best case scenario and destroyed by all the forces of capital in the worst? Burtenshaw cannot point to a single historical example where an electoral project has meaningfully established working class control over society. On the other hand, we can list every example of where social democracy has either simply managed capitalism, often rescuing it from crisis and selling out the people of countries oppressed by imperialism, as well as the most exploited elements of the domestic proletariat (e.g. the SPD post-WW1, the French Popular Front 1936, Attlee 1945, Wilson 1964, Mitterrand 1981, Syriza 2015, to name the most significant), or has been deemed intolerable to capital and so has been removed from power (e.g. the Australian Labor Party 1975).
The closest historical instance we might have of an elected government attempting to dismantle capitalism is Allende’s Chile, an example often raised by the Labour left. However, it seems almost too obvious to point out the cruel irony of commemorating Allende whilst refusing to learn any lessons from his fall and to inquire what made it possible in the first place. Blame cannot be laid merely at the feet of imperialism as so many unserious socialists are wont to do. Is imperialism all-powerful? No, there are many examples in which a better equipped and better trained imperialist army (or armies) has been defeated by an armed and organised people - from the Russian Civil War to China, Cuba to Vietnam. Imperialism, Mao taught us, is a paper tiger. The root of Allende’s defeat lies in the inevitable limitations of the parliamentary road.
At this point, it is worth noting the eurocentrism in Burtenshaw’s statement. It’s significant that he would leave out the example of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, a left social democratic project that has successfully resisted imperialist assault so far. On the other hand, perhaps it is precisely because Venezuela’s protracted economic crisis is proof of social democracy’s inability to overcome capitalist social relations that it has been overlooked (1). Certainly, if we were to look at the fate of the other ‘Pink Tide’ governments we would not be encouraged by the viability of the parliamentary road.
Though there may still be important debates to be had about the value of socialists contesting elections as a tactical measure, we have no reason to believe that a socialist strategy premised on electoralism is capable of overcoming the capitalist state and we have every reason to believe that it isn’t. Whilst it is true that the great historic communist revolutions also ended, ultimately, in defeat and the restoration of capitalism, the question of keeping proletarian power once it has been established is a different theoretical problem to that of establishing it in the first place. On this issue, the revolutionary road categorically wins out.
Therefore, it is more than reasonable to assume that a successful Corbynite project would have been the continuation of British imperialism on grounds more acceptable to a contingent of the British working class and nothing more. Perhaps this is enough for some Labour members, but if we claim to be genuine socialists and internationalists then it cannot be enough for us. There were those who argued over the past five years that the reforms brought in under a Corbyn government, though insufficient, would strategically strengthen the working class movement and lay the ground for the next stage of struggle. Whether this view was correct or not, it matters little now. The struggle to remake the Labour Party has been lost and arguably it ceased to be fought after the 2017 General Election when the Party pivoted to a permanent election-footing. The left will not control Labour again for at least another five years, more likely another ten or fifteen, and then there’s again the question of actually getting into government. The fact that more people didn’t vote in the leadership election than voted for Starmer is as much an indictment of the organised Labour left as it is of him - the mass membership that was once the base of Corbynism’s strength could not be mobilised to support the project’s continuation as turnout decreased from 78% in the 2016 leadership election to only 63% in 2020, signalling widespread disillusionment with internal Labour politics that can only have been exacerbated by the revelations of the recent report on bureaucratic sabotage. The door on this particular struggle has well and truly slammed shut.
However, this doesn’t have to mean that it was all for naught - it can be a stepping stone to something more powerful, more militant, and more successful because abandoning reformism does not mean abandoning the struggle for reforms. Building a strong revolutionary movement makes positive reforms more possible because the ruling class will try harder to placate the organised masses. Revolutionaries are better reformists than the reformists themselves. We must take the energy and enthusiasm of the Corbyn moment and bring it forward into new and higher forms of organising instead of allowing it to dissipate into apathy or ossify in unreformable Labour structures.
We have established that there is little reason to believe the Labour Party can ever deliver genuine socialism. What, then, is the value of lending it support? Those who claim to be not just socialists but communists, who apparently number much of the Labour left, have often found their justification in Lenin’s work ‘Left-Wing Communism’. In it, he criticised the emerging theorists of the yet-to-be-established Communist Party of Great Britain for dogmatically opposing the Labour Party and thereby holding back the revolution in Britain. Revolutionary consciousness was not present amongst a mass of the workers, who instead put their faith in Labour and so the Party had to be worked with before things could change. Lenin, too, recognised the value in electoral politics for transforming consciousness on a mass scale (2). However, what is often (see: always) missed is that Lenin encouraged communists to critically support the Labour Party in order to expose it as the opportunist organisation that it is. In light of this, why would supposed communists make their primary political task for the next decade or so the revival of the Labour Party? Lenin’s argument for supporting Labour was that the masses must witness for themselves the opportunism of social democracy before they will be willing to accept the necessity of communism. If our aim is for the masses to reject reformism, why is now not as good a time as any to agitate for such a line? What is the point in spending years rebuilding working class trust in the Labour Party when our ultimate aim is to destroy it again? It is absurd in the extreme. The argument of some ‘critical’ Corbyn supporters appears to have seamlessly transitioned from Corbynism as a stepping stone to the Labour Party as the permanent and non-negotiable vehicle for socialism in Britain. This is as tragic as it is foolish.
Some might retort that the strength of Labour’s support amongst the youth means that trust is still there for the newest generation of workers. Yet it remains to be seen if Labour can keep this constituency voting or whether their loyalty was to Corbyn’s relatively radical policies and not the Labour Party as an institution. As Keir Starmer takes the Party to the right and increasingly fails to provide any answers to their worsening problems, how many will become once again disillusioned with electoral politics? What would be the value in persuading them otherwise? If there is a time to abandon ship, it is now.
So what is to be done? Burtenshaw scolds the ineffectiveness of ‘street movements and minoritarian radicalism’ pre-2015, perhaps for good reason, although it should be noted that there was much more patient, below-the-radar building of community power in that time than he might acknowledge. Some such examples which continue to inspire include Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth (HASL) and Sisters Uncut, groups which have had much success in confronting reactionary Labour councils and defending working class and oppressed people. In a numbers game, the Labour Party was always going to come out on top against the radical left especially given the amount of radicals who joined Labour under Corbyn hoping to make the best of the opportunity that moment provided. However, the moment has now passed; the door is shut. If the Labour Party cannot be the vehicle for socialism, and there is no better time than now to argue against reformism, then we must commit ourselves to (re)building a revolutionary movement regardless of how mountainous the task might be. Though it does need to be accepted that theoretical arguments will not suffice when it comes to persuading those who do not already accept the necessity of revolutionary politics and it is incumbent on us who uphold that line to demonstrate its correctness in practice. However, those who claim to already accept revolutionary necessity must commit themselves to that much more worthwhile project instead of merely sticking with the devil they know. Remaining unpersuaded is one thing but agreeing and refusing to act is another.
Thankfully, the building blocks of this new movement have already begun to emerge. The past few years have seen the rise of ACORN, Living Rent and other tenant and community unions as well as the groundbreaking successes of independent radical trade unionism in the form of the United Voices of the World and the Independent Workers of Great Britain. These fighting organisations, though not necessarily revolutionary in and of themselves, actualise class confrontation and root themselves in the daily lives of the working class. Though Labour members have certainly played their role in building them up, these unions are not wedded to the Labour Party as an institution. Continuing to develop fighting organisations such as these should be a focus of socialists in the coming years.
There is, of course, a difference between an extra-parliamentary movement that is consciously revolutionary and one that is simply militant reformism. The need for revolutionary theory and organisation still persists and Britain is noticeably lacking in the calibre of theoretical debates that we see in other countries, even in the West. Having said that, the situation when it comes to revolutionary parties is far better than it was before. Without passing judgement on their respective political lines, both Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century and Red Fightback have emerged as groups committed to democracy and accountability; the explicit dedication to fight against abuse and chauvinism within the ranks of the proletarian movement is much needed and very welcome. Whatever the future of these groups, if there is one, the dire need for revolutionary organisation is ever-present. There are many questions to be asked and few easy answers but this is the task before us. We must embrace it if we ever hope to see a socialist future.
A stage in the struggle has ended, a new one emerges. The history of the socialist movement is the history of ebb and flow, of one struggle transforming into another. It is a law of dialectics that things turn into their opposites. Now is the time for all principled socialists to seriously learn the lessons of history and take the leap from reformism into revolutionary politics, leaving behind their emotional attachments and their job opportunities. Whatever challenges the future brings, nothing could be more important than ensuring that there is a strong and independent movement to overcome them. Leave the Labour Party, let it die, and let the revolutionary movement be born.
Notes
1) This shouldn’t be taken as an endorsement of the imperialist plot to oust Maduro. It is simply a recognition that all Marxists should make that it’s precisely because Venezuela remains a capitalist country that it is in crisis. The PSUV has not, and cannot without carrying the socialist revolution to completion, overcome the contradictions it faces.
2) For the purpose of this piece, I will not assess to what extent this premise is correct to begin with. It has rightly been a topic of debate amongst communists during the Corbyn period, as should be expected of a Marxism that is a living science and not a religious dogma.