Is there a future for the Labour Left?

A historic pamphlet from just after the defeat of the 1983 election, written by Pete Goodwin, Is there a future for the Labour Left? A Socialist Workers' Party Pamphlet, is now online at the Marxist Internet Archive.  Wags might say, today a more appropriate pamphlet to read would be 'Is there a future for the SWP? A Labour Left pamphlet', given the massive rise of Corbynism over the past year or so.  However, for those Corbynites willing to defy Tom Watson's edicts and interested in what a 'Trotskyist' analysis of the Labour Party might look like, this little SWP pamphlet is not a bad place to start...  the conclusion however - that a revolutionary socialist organisation independent of the Labour Party needs to be built - may come as somewhat of a shock to those who believe Tom Watson's dossier on hard left entrism...  and may even convince some Corbynites to read some more Trotsky for themselves ... and who knows where that could lead? 

International Socialism #149 out now

The latest issue of International Socialism is now online, and while there is a host of material relating to Marxist theory and history, from debates about the level of class struggle in Britain to the struggle for climate justice, and discussion of figures from Erich Fromm to Leon Trotsky and E.P. Thompson, it leads with Mark L Thomas on the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, while Jane Hardy looks at debates in radical and Marxist economics. Other key pieces include Anne Alexander writes on ISIS, imperialism and the war in Syria, and Alex Callinicos analyses the strategy and tactics for anti-imperialists in the West as they set about resisting the long war on 'terror' underway, in Britain through re-building the Stop the War Coalition. As he concludes:

One thing is clear, amid the chaos, confusion and bloodshed in the Middle East: imperialism is a key part of the problem there. The US, Britain, France, Russia and the rest, can do no good there. They should get out of the Middle East and leave its peoples to find their own way to the goals of democracy and social justice that inspired the revolutions of 2011. In the meantime, the task of the Western left is to rebuild the anti-war movement, and mobilise as many people as possible in a campaign to force our governments finally to end the long war.

Revolutionaries and the Labour Party

 Phil Evans on the Labour Party and socialism

In 1982, at the height of 'Bennism', the late, great Marxist Duncan Hallas (1925-2002) - author of among other things a pamphlet on The Labour Party: Myth and Reality, wrote an important article for International Socialism on 'Revolutionaries and the Labour Party'.  As Hallas put it, 'the aim of this article is a modest one. It is to clarify the attitudes revolutionaries have taken towards the Labour Party, to review the experience and to assess the situation of today. In particular, the problem of what is called entrism – revolutionary organisations operating inside the Labour Party – is considered in some detail'.  Amidst the exciting rise of 'Corbynism', it may well repay re-reading by revolutionaries again today, not least as his conclusion retains its relevance:  'The task of revolutionary socialists is to face reality, to recognise things as they are, to fight very hard in support of all the struggles that do occur, to seek to increase their numbers and influence on that basis, to apply the united-front approach systematically and untiringly. It is also to patiently explain, to clarify what is and what is not revolutionary work. Both these tasks require a revolutionary party, operating openly under its own banner...'

La Lutte Continue

After the generally disastrous general election, the struggle continues...

Kick the Tories Out - but sorry Russell, you are wrong about Ed Miliband

The Marxist theorist John Molyneux wrote an excellent piece back in 2013 in which he noted the tendency for the ostensibly opposing political currents of autonomism and left-reformism to come together to find common ground - and how this was because both political tendencies had more in common with each other than they did with any kind of strategy based on working class self-emancipation and building revolutionary democracy based on workers' power - which is at the heart of revolutionary Marxist politics. To quote Molyneux:

  an anarchist/autonomist type strategy which downplays the role of the state (Hardt and Negri) or rejects the taking of state power altogether (see John Holloway’s ‘How to Change the World without Taking Power’) can more easily coexist with a strategy of a reformist government of the left than either of these strategies can coexist with a revolutionary Marxist perspective of building a revolutionary party and smashing the capitalist state. They, the anarchist/autonomists, do their thing at the base, in the localities etc., while the reformists do their thing at the level of government. Two interesting historic precedents for this are: 1) the early 20th century ‘economist’ tendency in Russian Social Democracy who argued that the job of Social Democrats was to restrict themselves to supporting the economic struggles of the working class and not get involved in political struggle which, as Lenin explained at the time, meant leaving politics to the liberal bourgeoisie; 2) the Spanish Revolution where the anarcho-syndicalists refusal to take state power (on the grounds of being opposed to any kind of dictatorship) morphed into support for the bourgeois liberal/ Communist/reformist Popular Front government.

 Russell Brand's dramatic switch from a kind of eclectic autonomism (mixed with spirituality) which was highly critical of electoralist compromises and parliamentary corruption and instead called for a 'Revolution of Consciousness',  to now openly calling for radicals to vote en masse for Ed Miliband's Labour Party (except in Scotland and Brighton where he is obviously happy to go with the tide and support the SNP / Greens respectively) is just one more demonstration of the political truth (or 'trewth' to use Brand's term) highlighted by Molyneux. Another was relayed at a meeting the veteran socialist theorist Colin Barker did in Leeds earlier this year - he recalled meeting a young unknown Spanish anarchist academic who came over to the UK a few years ago to give a talk on Rosa Luxemburg, and who was highly critical of parliamentary politics. When Barker next heard the name of this young anarchist academic he was surprised to learn that he was now an MEP and the leader of the left-reformist Podemos party in Spain - his name was Pablo Iglesias.

 Today serious revolutionary politics - which understand the strategic problems posed by any perspective of the left thinking it can try and take control of the capitalist state as though that state was somehow neutral - are so apparently intellectually unfashionable in Britain that even the likes of Richard Seymour give their support for the left-reformist Green Party (incidentally, in Leeds, many of the 'autonomists' I know personally joined the Green Party during their recent membership 'surge' while one is now standing as a parliamentary candidate for the even less radical single-issue party Yorkshire First).

 And so now we come to the spectacle of Brand endorsing Ed Miliband -  with Miliband being surely one of the very few people who thinks the blood soaked war criminal Tony Blair might still be an electoral asset to the Labour Party - and someone who would apparently prefer a Tory government than going into coalition with the SNP to keep the Tories out - and someone who has just decided to effectively build his political gravestone - sorry 'Ed stone' - which is a pitiful mixture of platitudes ('a better future') and racism ('controls on immigration'). I guess we should be grateful that Ed Miliband didn't raise Gordon Brown's 'British Jobs for British workers' slogan but nonetheless Miliband's vision is so uninspiring he can't even bring himself to write phrases such as 'welfare not warfare' or 'no to privatisation' on his headstone, let alone (God forbid!) the words 'democratic socialism'.

Of course in many places on Thursday radicals and socialists will have to hold their noses and vote Labour to either try to block the Tories or UKIP - or try to punish the Lib Dems - but lets be honest -there are only a handful of Labour MPs and prospective candidates that are actually worthy of the votes of socialists.  In safe Labour seats - what on earth is the point of the Left voting for careerists who like their leader Miliband himself (during the 100 day Care UK strike which took place in his own constituency of Doncaster) - wouldn't go near a local picket line of striking health workers to show solidarity but would find time to travel all the way up to Scotland in an effort to save the Trident nuclear submarines and to save the British imperialist state from breaking up? In Leeds for example we have the likes of Shadow minister Rachel Reeves, who wants to cut benefits for the unemployed, and another Shadow minister Hilary Benn, who was part of Blair's cabinet which took us into the criminal and disastrous Iraq war, surely it is absolutely right for socialists to stand against them as part of TUSC?  And that is before we get to some of the real renegades, racists and charlatans who exist among the roster of Labour MPs standing again as parliamentary candidates, at least one of which (Frank Field) is so right wing he has worked happily with the Tory government as a 'poverty tsar'  and others (like Simon Danczuk) who were considering defecting to UKIP not so long ago...and may well still do so in future if UKIP is not blocked.   My goodness, even Blair's partner in war crime Jack Straw - whose arrogance, ignorance and pomposity are legendary- would have liked to have run for parliament again until his own greed meant he was gloriously hoisted by his own petard recently.

I understand that Russell Brand is still learning about politics - and to be fair to him he is a good learner and no doubt he will ultimately come to chalk this one up to experience and come to realise the error of his ways sooner rather than later after Thursday - so I don't want to be too harsh on the lad - especially given his eloquence and brilliance in using the platform he has as a celebrity to amplify all manner of critical struggles and providing a powerful moral critique of the capitalist system and the destruction it causes to people's lives and to the planet - all of which is so badly needed in the current period - but it is not as if these political questions of revolutionary organisation, strategy and tactics are all completely new - there is a whole history of the Labour Party and what Labour governments are like in power out there on the record - which it might be interesting for Brand to begin to acquaint himself with at some point.   As as aside, one of the limitations of left-reformist thinking is how it is so intrinsically a-historical  - its kind of ingrained - one simply has to place the whole past record of failure where Labour governments are concerned in the 'memory hole' and believe naively that somehow, almost mystically, the next Labour government will be better than the last - just because they can't imagine how it could be any worse.  Even though the record of Labour governments ever since 1945 have all been worse than their predecessors - and a Miliband government will be even worse than Blair's given the scale of cuts and attacks on workers that he will have to drive through given the depth of the capitalist crisis.

Given this, reading some of Ed's dad Ralph for example might be well worth Russell Brand (and others) sitting down and doing at some point - Parliamentary Socialism not being a bad place to start.


'Milibrand' - if only Russell was more into Ralph than Ed...

 When Ed Miliband became leader of the Labour Party - I highlighted some of Ralph Miliband's words which Brand might reflect on if he genuinely believes that Ed Miliband is going to be interested in listening to voices like his - and wider democratic grassroots movements - once he is in power:

 In 1966, Ralph Miliband for example, commenting on Harold Wilson, noted that 'when Mr. Wilson so unexpectedly became leader of the Labour Party, many people on the Left thought that their situation had been drastically changed, and that left-wing voices would at long last be effectively heard at the highest reaches of Labour policy-making.' Such illusions were soon to be proved wrong - not least after Wilson became Prime Minister in 1964.

But for Ralph Miliband, the idea of 'parliamentary socialism' itself brought about through the Labour Party was a flawed strategy - and socialists would be better off trying to build up a socialist alternative to the Labour Party from below:

 'It is absurd to think that the men who now rule the Labour Party, and who will go on ruling it, will ever want, or would agree under pressure, to push the Labour Party in socialist directions, and to show the resolution, single-mindedness and staying-power which such reorientation would require. Carthorses should not be expected to win the Derby. To believe, against all the weight of accumulated evidence, that the Labour leaders can, for instance, be made to adopt a “socialist foreign policy” if it is presented to them in sufficiently alluring terms is pure delusion, on a par with Robert Owen’s hope that Metternich would act on the plan for a Co-operative Commonwealth of Europe which Owen presented to him at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818...'

Miliband went on:

'What this amounts to is that the Labour Party is and will remain as much of a non-socialist party as it has ever been, with its leaders providing a Lib-Lab, non-socialist alternative to the Conservative Party. This does not mean that the two parties are now “the same”. They are in fact very different, in terms of the kind of people who mainly vote for each party, in terms of their membership and the aspirations of their activists. But the parliamentary leaders of the Labour Party (and the point applies, though to a lesser degree to the leaders of the Conservative Party) have always been able to attenuate the political expression of these differences to the point where they do not, in concrete terms, endanger the “neo-capitalist” framework which both party leaderships now accept as permanent... This reproduces, though at a different level, a situation which endured for the best part of the nineteenth century as between the Tory and Liberal parties. These parties were not by any means “the same”; but, as Lord Balfour noted in a famous Introduction to Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution, their “alternating Cabinets, though belonging to different Parties ... never differed about the foundations of society”...'

The task for radicals and socialists in the current period is surely not to line up behind Labour ala Brand but to try and unite to build a genuine socialist alternative to this cosy capitalist consensus - and prepare for the class struggles to come whoever wins on Thursday. The more votes that the genuine socialists, radicals and revolutionaries like TUSC get the stronger the Left will be to fight austerity and cuts after the election. Our slogan should be - 'Vote to Kick the Tories Out - but vote Left to build the socialist alternative where you can'.

That said and done, I should really stop blogging about Brand and get out there campaigning for TUSC myself.  I will leave you with some more reading which is timely - a critique of the first five years of Tony Blair's government from 1997-2001 (so pre-Afghan and Iraq wars) by the late socialist journalist Paul Foot - Why You Should Vote Socialist (2001).

Reasons to vote TUSC # 94

New Labour's racist campaign mug - vote Trade Union and Socialist Coalition - a party that stands for working class solidarity and unity against the 'divide and rule' agenda of our ruling class...

Why we need a socialist alternative to Labour

On 28 September 1864, 150 years ago, a mass meeting was held in St Martin’s Hall in central London to launch a new organisation, the “International Working Men’s Association” (IWMA) - the First International. In the IWMA's Inaugural Address, written by Karl Marx, the group stressed the importance of workers challenging the “criminal designs” of their own capitalist class, their “playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people’s blood and treasure”.

 Sadly the IWMA fell apart in the 1870s, but the Socialist (Second) International which was formed in 1889 to replace it on paper at least continued something of this honourable anti-imperialist tradition. For example, in 1906 the Labour Party in Britain, an affiliate of the Second International in 1906 declared it was against 'wars fought to make the rich richer,' while 'underfed schoolchildren are still neglected'. Tragically, the Second International famously failed the test of the First World War, as the majority of its affiliate organisations voted to support this bloody inter-imperialist conflict. The leaders of the organisations which make up what is still nominally called the Socialist International - which include the Labour Party in Britain - have not learnt anything from its past mistakes with respect to history, at least not if the Iraq wars past and present are anything to go by. In 2003, a majority of Labour MPs voted to support Bush and Blair's criminal and disastrous Iraq War - with only 139 voted against. In 2006, only 12 Labour MPs voted for an inquiry into the Iraq War. Now with Cameron's current Iraq War, only 23 Labour MPs voted against - and the vast majority of Labour MPs who forgot the lessons of past imperialist interventions from 1914 onwards and voted for war are below:

 The Labour MPs who voted in favour were: Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East & Saddleworth), Bob Ainsworth (Coventry North East), Douglas Alexander (Paisley & Renfrewshire South), Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East), Dave Anderson (Blaydon), Mr Jon Ashworth (Leicester South), Ian Austin (Dudley North), Adrian Bailey (West Bromwich West), Willie Bain (Glasgow North East), Ed Balls (Morley & Outwood), Gordon Banks (Ochil & Perthshire South), Kevin Barron (Rother Valley), Hugh Bayley (York Central), Dame Margaret Beckett (Derby South), Hilary Benn (Leeds Central), Luciana Berger (Liverpool Wavertree), Clive Betts (Sheffield South East), Roberta Blackman-Woods (Durham, City of), Hazel Blears (Salford & Eccles), Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South & Cleveland East), Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central), David Blunkett (Sheffield Brightside & Hillsborough), Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West), Lyn Brown (West Ham), Nicholas Brown (Newcastle upon Tyne East), Russell Brown (Dumfries & Galloway), Karen Buck (Westminster North), Richard Burden (Birmingham Northfield), Andy Burnham (Leigh), Liam Byrne (Birmingham Hodge Hill), Alan Campbell (Tynemouth), Sarah Champion (Rotherham), Tom Clarke (Coatbridge, Chryston & Bellshill), Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley), Vernon Coaker (Gedling), Ann Coffey (Stockport), Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract & Castleford), David Crausby (Bolton North East), Mary Creagh (Wakefield), Stella Creasy (Walthamstow), Jon Cruddas (Dagenham & Rainham), John Cryer (Leyton & Wanstead), Alex Cunningham (Stockton North), Jim Cunningham (Coventry South), Tony Cunningham (Workington), Simon Danczuk (Rochdale), Alistair Darling (Edinburgh South West), Wayne David (Caerphilly), Geraint Davies (Swansea West), Gloria De Piero (Ashfield), John Denham (Southampton Itchen), Frank Dobson (Holborn & St Pancras), Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline & Fife West), Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South & Penarth), Jim Dowd (Lewisham West & Penge), Gemma Doyle (Dunbartonshire West), Jack Dromey (Birmingham Erdington), Michael Dugher (Barnsley East), Angela Eagle (Wallasey), Maria Eagle (Garston & Halewood), Clive Efford (Eltham), Julie Elliott (Sunderland Central), Natascha Engel (Derbyshire North East), Bill Esterson (Sefton Central), Chris Evans (Islwyn), Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme), Frank Field (Birkenhead), Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South), Caroline Flint (Don Valley), Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield), Hywel Francis (Aberavon), Mike Gapes (Ilford South), Barry Gardiner (Brent North), Pat Glass (Durham North West), Mary Glindon (Tyneside North), Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland), Tom Greatrex (Rutherglen & Hamilton West), Kate Green (Stretford & Urmston), Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South), Nia Griffith (Llanelli), Andrew Gwynne (Denton & Reddish), Peter Hain (Neath), Fabian Hamilton (Leeds North East), Harriet Harman (Camberwell & Peckham), Tom Harris (Glasgow South), Dai Havard (Merthyr Tydfil & Rhymney), John Healey (Wentworth & Dearne), Mark Hendrick (Preston), David Heyes (Ashton Under Lyne), Meg Hillier (Hackney South & Shoreditch), Julie Hilling (Bolton West), Margaret Hodge (Barking), Sharon Hodgson (Washington & Sunderland West), Jim Hood (Lanark & Hamilton East), George Howarth (Knowsley), Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central), Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore), Glenda Jackson (Hampstead & Kilburn), Cathy Jamieson (Kilmarnock & Loudoun), Major Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central), Graham Jones (Hyndburn), Kevan Jones (Durham North), Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South), Dame Tessa Jowell (Dulwich & West Norwood), Mike Kane (Wythenshawe & Sale East), Elizabeth Kendall (Leicester West), Sadiq Khan (Tooting), David Lammy (Tottenham), Christopher Leslie (Nottingham East), Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields), Ivan Lewis (Bury South), Andy Love (Edmonton), Ian Lucas (Wrexham), Steve McCabe (Birmingham Selly Oak), Michael McCann (East Kilbride, Strathaven & Lesmahagow), Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East), Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham & Morden), Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough), Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East), Alison McGovern (Wirral South), Jim McGovern (Dundee West), Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North), Khalid Mahmood (Birmingham Perry Barr), Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham Ladywood), Seema Malhotra (Feltham & Heston), John Mann (Bassetlaw), Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South), Michael Meacher (Oldham West & Royton), Alan Meale (Mansfield), Ian Mearns (Gateshead), Ed Miliband (Doncaster North), Andrew Miller (Ellesmere Port & Neston), Madeleine Moon (Bridgend), Jessica Morden (Newport East), Meg Munn (Sheffield Heeley), Jim Murphy (Renfrewshire East), Paul Murphy (Torfaen), Lisa Nandy (Wigan), Pamela Nash (Airdrie & Shotts), Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central), Sandra Osborne (Ayr, Carrick & Cumnock), Albert Owen (Ynys Mon), Toby Perkins (Chesterfield), Bridget Phillipson (Houghton & Sunderland South), Stephen Pound (Ealing North), Lucy Powell (Manchester Central), Nick Raynsford (Greenwich & Woolwich), Jamie Reed (Copeland), Steve Reed (Croydon North), Rachel Reeves (Leeds West), Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East), Jonathan Reynolds (Stalybridge & Hyde), John Robertson (Glasgow North West), Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West), Lindsay Roy (Glenrothes), Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd), Anas Sarwar (Glasgow Central), Andy Sawford (Corby), Alison Seabeck (Plymouth Moor View), Virendra Sharma (Ealing Southall), Jim Sheridan (Paisley & Renfrewshire North), Gavin Shuker (Luton South), Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith), Angela Smith (Penistone & Stocksbridge), Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent), Owen Smith (Pontypridd), John Spellar (Warley), Gisela Stuart (Birmingham Edgbaston), Gerry Sutcliffe (Bradford South), Mark Tami (Alyn & Deeside), Gareth Thomas (Harrow West), Emily Thornberry (Islington South & Finsbury), Stephen Timms (East Ham), Jon Trickett (Hemsworth), Karl Turner (Hull East), Derek Twigg (Halton), Stephen Twigg (Liverpool West Derby), Chuka Umunna (Streatham), Keith Vaz (Leicester East), Valerie Vaz (Walsall South), Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North), Dave Watts (St Helens North), Alan Whitehead (Southampton Test), Chris Williamson (Derby North), Phil Wilson (Sedgefield), Rosie Winterton (Doncaster Central), John Woodcock (Barrow & Furness), Shaun Woodward (St Helens South & Whiston), David Wright (Telford) and Iain Wright (Hartlepool).

 These pro-war Labour MPs have let down themselves and their voters very badly indeed - sanctioning a return of Western imperialism to the scene of its greatest crime in recent memory - and all of them deserve to face a left wing challenge to them in the general election. All socialists in Britain should surely now work together - whether in TUSC, Left Unity, Respect or whatever - to unite and rally around credible candidates in each area who can stand against as many of these people and raise the banner of 'Welfare not Warfare - Stop the Cuts - Stop the Bombing of Iraq'. Organising to stop the war in Iraq and organising for an anti-war left wing challenge in the 2015 general election is the best tribute we can pay to those pioneers - including Karl Marx himself - who formed the First International 150 years ago - and restore some honour to the words 'socialist internationalism'.

The passion of Ed Miliband

Ed Miliband rarely shows any passion about anything - so to see him revealing his passionate desire to preserve the unity of the British imperialist state while giving a speech in Scotland warning against independence - came as a bit of a shock to the system.  It is a damning indictment of Miliband that he refuses to show 0.0001 percent of the same passion when it comes to supporting striking Care UK workers in his own constituency of Doncaster, which he refuses to do despite the fact these workers are victims of NHS privatisation, which Miliband is supposed to be passionately against...  perhaps the reason he shows such newly discovered passion about the Scottish referendum is because his own job as Labour leader will be threatened if Scottish people vote Yes?

John Newsinger on Owen Jones

Guardian columnist Owen Jones was recently described by comedian Russell Brand as 'Our generation's Orwell' in an endorsement for Jones's new bestselling book The Establishment. It is therefore perhaps only fitting that John Newsinger, author of Orwell's Politics and a general authority on Orwell was asked to review Jones's book in the latest Socialist Review. The review itself is well worth reading and a good analysis of Jones's politics - check it out here. My personal wish with respect for Owen Jones is for him to at some point explain to the rest of us exactly how he sees the transition to socialism coming about through Ed Miliband's Labour Party, given its history as - in the words of Ed's dad Ralph - being at best 'a party of modest social reform in a capitalist system within whose confines it is ever more firmly and by now irrevocably rooted' and Ralph Miliband's argument that 'the belief in the effective transformation of the Labour Party into an instrument of socialist policies is the most crippling of all illusions to which socialists in Britain have been prone' ...

Edited to add: Another review of Jones's book by Paul Blackledge in Marx and Philosophy Review of Books

On David Miliband's departure from British politics

From the BBC report

Labour leader Ed Miliband says his brother David's decision to quit as an MP and move to a US-based charity leaves UK politics "a poorer place".

Certainly does - David Miliband has been one of the richer UK politicians having made so much money over the last few years while moon-lighting on the side as an MP he had to set up his own company, 'The Office of David Miliband Limited'.

David Miliband announced he was to accept the "new challenge and new start" of running the International Rescue Committee in New York... In his letter to his constituency party chairman, David Miliband said the International Rescue Committee was founded in the 1930s at Albert Einstein's suggestion to help people fleeing the Nazis. And his own family history - his parents both fled Germany in the 1930s - meant "I feel that in doing this job I will be repaying a personal debt".  "This job brings together my personal story and political life - it represents a new challenge and a new start," he said.

David - any chance before you go of having a quiet word with your brother Ed Miliband, reminding him of your family history, and trying and stop New Labour joining the Tories in playing the race card and attacking migrant workers today?

The former foreign secretary, 47, was beaten by a narrow margin by brother Ed in the 2010 Labour leadership contest.

Yep, I remember it well - one of the funniest moments in recent British politics.  David Miliband could have won that election easily if he had dared to deviate just one milimetre to the left from Blairism. 

David said it was "very difficult" to leave Parliament and UK politics.

I bet it was - like his brother, David Miliband was always a careerist first and foremost.

But after serving as an MP for 12 years, he said: "I now have to make a choice about how to give full vent to my ideas and ideals."

Ideas? Ideals? Well David's dad certainly had some ideas and ideals, but if David ever had some,  I agree they didn't get any vent - let alone 'full vent' - while he was an MP, so there is at least some logic to this argument. 

Tony Blair, former Labour leader and prime minister, said: "I congratulate David on his appointment to a major international position. It shows the huge regard in which David is held worldwide. I'm sure he will do a great job. He is obviously a massive loss to UK politics.
"He was the head of my policy unit and then a truly distinguished minister in the government and remains one of the most capable progressive thinkers and leaders globally. I hope and believe this is time out, not time over."

Such praise from a mass murdering war-criminal like Tony Blair says everything you need to know about David Miliband's 'contribution' to UK politics - lets hope David Miliband's departure is not only 'time over' for this complete and utter Blairite standard-bearer, but for Blairism in general. 

David Miliband's former cabinet colleagues, Lord Mandelson and Jack Straw, said they did not think it was the end of his political career.... Mr Straw said he would be "welcomed back into the Labour movement".

The Labour movement?  I guess with a capital 'L', it is reasonable to talk of the 'Labour movement' in this manner - as in a 'movement' devoted to the Labour Party getting power.  But Labour movement with a small 'l'?  As far as the labour movement in the sense of trade unions and working class people collectively organising to change society goes, surely both Jack Straw and David Miliband - sorry the 'The Office of David Miliband Limited' -  left that a very long time ago...

Anyway, lets hope the British Left can unite in order to give the voters of South Shields a socialist alternative  to the austerity politics and racism on offer from the main three parties in the forthcoming by-election...

International Socialism # 137

Internationalism seems to be the theme of the new ISJ (full contents here), with Phil Marfleet writing on the latest stages of the Egyptian Revolution, an interview with Pete Alexander about the Marikana massacre of mineworkers in the new neo-liberal ANC led South Africa, Mike Gonzalez on politics in Latin America which once again hang in the balance given Chavez's illness, as well as other pieces including Jane Hardy on 'new divisions of labour in the global economy. There are also other treats, including Alex Callinicos's review of Neil Davidson's epic work on bourgeois revolution, a piece on how the German Left failed to stop the rise of Hitler's Nazis to power 80 years ago this month, as well as Ian Birchall on Ed Miliband's new hero, the 'One Nation' Tory Benjamin Disraeli.

Some early reflections on 'One Nation Labourism'

Or, how can socialists challenge the 'new conservatism' of Ed Miliband?

The official British labour movement is supposed to be marvelling at the intellectual genius of Ed Miliband this week - for a) doing what anyone involved in acting at any level can do, i.e. learn the lines of a speech written for him and deliver them in public, b) noticing there is a paternalistic historic political tradition called 'One Nation Toryism' dating back to Disraeli (that along with 'Old Labour' died something of a death when British capitalism stopped growing from the 1970s onwards and so making some meaningful positive reforms to benefit the poor was no longer easily done), and c)  noticing that no previous Labour leader has tried to invent a new tradition of 'One Nation Labourism' (perhaps because if anyone else before him had tried to raise this banner many people might have thought 'Hang on, isn't "One Nation Labourism" a bit too close to, er, "National Socialism"?' - something  Ed Miliband can just about get away with because of firstly Disraeli's own Jewish heritage and secondly Ed Miliband's own Jewish heritage and the experience of his family fleeing the Nazis).  Miliband's 'One Nation Labourism' looks as if it is basically 'Blue Labour Re-loaded' - but with less stress on appealing primarily to a 'white [supposedly racist] working class' up North and more stress on trying to win a [supposedly] nationalistic middle class in the South of England.  In other words, the solution for Ed Miliband is not only to adopt Tory policies (acceptance of cuts, public sector pay freeze etc etc) but now also use Tory rhetoric about how Britain is really apparently 'One Nation' (an 'imagined community' if there ever was one at the best of times but a sick joke at a time when inequality is at a record level in Britain) - as well.    So what is to be done, aside from building the fight back by marching for 'a future that works' on 20 October and trying to build a new tradition of political trade unionism independent of Labour among the rank and file of British trade unionists by supporting initiatives like Unite the Resistance?  Here I think we can learn something from the late Marxist intellectual Ralph Miliband - Ed's father - in an article he wrote in 1987 for Socialist Register with Leo Panitch on 'Socialists and the "New Conservatism"'.  Speaking of the social democratic parties like Labour (this is before the rise of New Labour - so his criticism applies doubly today), Miliband senior noted that:

These parties, or at least their leaders, offer at best a return to the days of the Keynesian/welfare state, a reflationary fiscal policy and corporatist-style relations with the trade unions. In effect, they boast of a ‘new realism’ which promises an even more thorough accommodation with capitalism than before. A cloudy rhetoric mingles some of the catch-phrases of the new conservatism with the theme of ‘social compassion’. Thus, Neil Kinnock offers ‘efficiency, individual liberty, wealth creation, patriotism’ as the guiding tenets of the Labour Party, and then adds ‘justice, compassion, and equality’ for good measure. This is supposed to ‘reassert democratic socialist values as an effective body of values for modern needs rather than a ghost from the past’. (The Future of Socialism, Fabian Tract no.509, 1985) But this verbiage, and the policy proposals which accompany it, leaves altogether untouched something which is not ghostly at all, namely the existing structures of power, property and privilege of ‘late capitalism’, and the structures of domination which it is the purpose of socialism to dissolve.

This is why an essential task for socialists is to conduct a sustained, principled and informed critique of social democratic leaders, the result of whose endeavours is not to advance socialist transformation but to retard it. Making this critique presents many problems in the light of diverse electoral and political considerations; and there is always the danger that such a critique will turn into ineffective vituperation. Nevertheless, the socialist case has to be affirmed and developed if it is not to be lost in a fog of obfuscating rhetoric.

The difficulty of the task is underlined by the fact that socialists in Britain have to support the return of a Labour Government; and American socialists, presented with no alternative in many states, may even have to vote for Democratic candidates. In the constricted choice offered at the present time, it is clearly of great importance that the most reactionary bourgeois politicians [e.g. Cameron, Clegg today - Ed] should be driven from office. But socialists have long been aware that elections alone do not determine public policy. The outcome of elections has certain effects, and that is a virtue of capitalist democracy. But the reforms that may flow from electoral outcomes are limited and vulnerable. This is why the purpose of political action for socialists must not only be the achievement of immediate defensive victories, but the widening of the basis of support for reforms which open the way for more fundamental transformations.

We are under no illusion that the institutions of capitalist democracy provide the mechanisms of a smooth achievement of such reforms. Even if a government pledged to radical changes of policy at home and abroad were to be brought to office on the basis of a substantial electoral and parliamentary majority, we have no doubt that it would meet fierce resistance from conservative forces, international as well as national. But this is not the issue before us today in the countries of advanced capitalism. On any realistic assessment, the coming to office of such a government is not an immediate prospect, to say the least, and this makes speculation on the likely ‘scenario’ when such a government does gain office not very relevant to the immediate tasks facing socialists in these countries. Speculation on the degree of opposition even to the re-establishment of something like the Keynesian/welfare state might be more in order.

In this connection, we note that there are many people on the Left who believe that the goal of the Left today should be to establish a Swedish or Austrian-style social democracy in countries like Britain or the United States. Even if this were the appropriate goal for socialists to pursue, it is our view that this fails to address the structural factors which prevented the emplacement of a hegemonic social democracy in the past. It was not that the leadership of the British Labour Party did not look to and admire Sweden; this was always the ‘beacon’ of even right wing social democrats. But the structural position of British capital in the world economy, the leading role of financial capital, the international function of the currency, all underwrote capital’s opposition to anything more than the tepid Keynesianism which the British Treasury practised in the postwar decades. The same factors account for capital’s successful opposition to effective trade union involvement in economic decision-making and the extensive ‘decommodification’ of services of the kind seen in Sweden and Austria. What is true of Britain in these respects is a fortiori true of the United States.

It was precisely such factors which rendered the advances that were made so vulnerable to the attacks of the ‘new conservatism’. In this view, those people on the Left who do want Swedish or Austrian-style social democracy, but who reject a confrontation with capital as too ‘extreme’, are simply refusing to face reality. In the conditions of ‘late capitalism’ in these countries, radical reform inescapably entails such a confrontation.

This means that socialists have to take a long-term view. Two closely related issues are involved. How do we go about convincing more and more people that there are socialist solutions to the shortcomings and derelictions of capitalism? And what are the agencies which will enable socialists to contribute collectively to the advancement of specific struggles, to the spread of socialist ideas, and ultimately to the struggle for power? 

...Social democracy, for all practical purposes, has long given up any such project. When forces within social democratic parties have arisen – and they repeatedly have – to push their leaders to the left, these forces have sooner or later been defeated, among other reasons because leaders under challenge could always claim that the Left was not only unreasonable, unrealistic, etc., but also that its challenge must be fatally damaging to the electoral chances of the party, given the spectacle presented to the electorate by a divided and squabbling party. Electoral considerations, in this respect as in many others, are inevitably of great help to party leaders, since these considerations push followers to want a ‘unity’ which is of great advantage to those who are in control of the party. Social democratic parties will long remain major actors on the political scene of capitalist democratic regimes; and as we have already noted, they are always to be supported against conservative parties. The important point, however, is that on all the evidence that has accumulated over many decades and in many countries, these parties cannot be expected to address seriously and effectively the task of education, mobilisation and struggle which any party truly committed to socialist transformation must undertake.

 There are many people on the Left today who strongly feel the need of a party free of the various shortcomings which have burdened the socialist movement in the past. At present, the will to embark on such an undertaking is stymied by the thought of past failures and disappointments, and by the sense that what matters above all is to support the existing parties which, however inadequate they may be, offer a chance to get rid of reactionary governments. But it is perfectly possible to give such support and yet to envisage the coming into being of new socialist formations that would seek to fulfil the many tasks that now go largely by default.

There is, however, a different sort of inhibition which has in recent years prevented many socialists from thinking seriously about socialist alternatives, in this and in other realms, and to which we have already made reference. This is the loss of confidence and even belief that the socialist project is more than a utopian vision; and with this goes a great deal of self-flagellation and breast-beating about the sins of omission and commission with which the Left charges the Left. Self-criticism is of course very necessary; but much that goes on in this vein is not so much self-criticism as self-indulgent political masochism, accompanied by further retreat from socialist purposes and policies.

All this will pass; and the crying need for new agencies of socialist transformation will sooner or later come to be seriously addressed.  In large measure, it is the deficiencies of social democratic and Communist parties which have produced the ‘new social movements’ of the last two decades – movements whose focus is sexual and race oppression, ecology and peace. These movements have undoubtedly enlarged and enriched the meaning of socialism. All such movements are an essential part of the coalition of forces on which a socialist movement must depend.

However, no such ‘new social movement’ can obviate the need for a socialist party (or parties). Nor can they replace organised labour as the main force on which a socialist movement must rely. Here, and in the actual or potential support of the working class in general, is where the main strength of such a movement has to be found. The ‘working class’ in advanced capitalist countries includes some three quarters of their population – blue collar, white collar, service and distributive workers, men and women, black and white, skilled and unskilled. The task of a socialist party is to afford a degree of coherence to a class which is inevitably fragmented and divided, and to do so without any pretension of achieving a necessarily artificial and imposed ‘monolithic’ unity.

In the coming years, two tasks are in this respect critical. The first is to persuade those workers who have moved electorally to the Right that the new conservatism [ie. Miliband  - Ed] is their enemy. The second task is to persuade those many members of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ working class who have never supported the Left that their interests and aspirations are bound up with the struggle against capitalism.

This is the necessary perspective for anyone committed to the task of socialist transformation. Any other perspective exposes those who harbour it to disillusion, despair and retreat. But long-term though the perspective is, it is not ‘millennial’: for the socialist project is solidly grounded in the growing awareness of vast numbers of men and women that the system cannot deliver on the promises which its apologists so generously dispense. The central problem for socialists is that this awareness is not accompanied by the conviction that there exists a socialist alternative to capitalism. It is this which must be overcome; and it can only be overcome if the socialist case is articulated and developed in a mode of thought and speech which is rigorous, fresh and accessible...

We are well aware that nothing which has been said here provides a blueprint for the solution of the many practical problems that socialists have to resolve if they are to make headway with the socialist project. Our justification, if one is needed, is that at this point of the struggle for socialism in the countries of advanced capitalism, there is need for more than a concentration on the nuts and bolts of the enterprise. At least as important, and in some ways more important, is a clear perception of the structure which the nuts and bolts are intended to keep in place. In other words, what is also needed and badly needed, is a reaffirmation of the principles and values which make up the socialist project, and an insistence that there are radical, rational and feasible alternatives to the ways of life dictated by a system whose own needs are ever more sharply in conflict with human needs.

The History Man: Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012)

 This morning, while teaching (a seminar on 'Social Justice and Inequality' appropriately enough), one of my students suddenly interrupted and said 'Could I just make an announcement: Eric Hobsbawm has just died'.  I had mixed initial emotions - impressed that a first year politics student knew of Hobsbawm and understood it was a significant enough event to interrupt the class, slight irritation and disappointment that the aforementioned student was clearly not paying full attention to the seminar discussion and was checking his phone - and, above all, I guess sadness that the inevitable had happened and Eric Hobsbawm - one of the greatest Marxist historians of the 'short twentieth century' and a towering figure perhaps almost unique in his range of concerns, breadth and depth of knowledge and command of sources - was no longer with us.

I only met Hobsbawm very briefly on one occasion - when he was speaking alongside Dorothy Thompson and John Saville at the launch of Saville's Memoirs of the Left in London almost a decade ago - but, ever since one of my history teachers at school had kindly photocopied an interview with Hobsbawm from the Guardian c mid-1990s for me because of my interest in Marxism, like many many others, his writings on Marxism, history and the responsibility of historians in society have been a massive influence.  The 1978 interview with Hobsbawm by Pat Thane and Elizabeth Lunbeck from Radical History Review provides one of the best short introductions to his life and work.  'It seems to me that it is very important to write history for people other than pure academics', Hobsbawm noted in that interview.  'The tendency in my lifetime has been for intellectual activity to be increasingly concentrated in universities and to be increasingly esoteric, so that it consists of professors talking for other professors and being overheard by students who have to reproduce their ideas or similar ideas in order to pass exams set by professors.  This distinctly narrows the intellectual discipline...the kind of people one aims at are, I hope, a fairly large section of the population - students, trade unionists, plain ordinary citizens who are not professionally committed to passing examinations but do want to know how the past turned into the present and what help it is in looking forward to the future'.

This healthy approach was shaped by Hobsbawm's commitment to politics and his leading role in the Communist Party Historians Group (and its successor groups) - which avoided what he saw as the 'danger' of Marxist history being about just labour history in the 19th and 20th centuries and instead 'had people who dealt with everything - classical antiquity, medieval feudalism, the English revolution.'  After beginning with the Fabians (on which he did his PhD), Hobsbawm did write some classic works on the modern labour movement like Labouring Men and Worlds of Labour but also wrote an extraordinarily wide range of topics, - from primitive rebels and social bandits like 'Robin Hood', to jazz (under the pseudonym 'Francis Newton') and 'Captain Swing' (an English agricultural workers rebellion), to his famous quartet on modern world history The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and The Age of Extremes.  His orthodox Communism - which led later to an embrace of what was becoming New Labour - and becoming 'Neil Kinnock's favourite Marxist' - meant parodoxically politically he was weak despite his generally outstanding strengths as a historian.  As Chris Harman noted in 2002 - reviewing Hobsbawm's autobiography Interesting Times, 'there might be two Eric Hobsbawms. One ended his book on the 20th century, The Age of Extremes, by describing the system as out of control and threatening all of humanity. The other was at that very time praising New Labour’s approach to politics....there is the Hobsbawm who still calls himself a Marxist, who wrote Labouring Men and The Age of Revolution, is scathing about the revisionist and postmodernist historians, is damning about the Blair government, and still insists on left wing political commitment.  But there is also the Hobsbawm who backed the Labour right against Tony Benn, told us the poll tax could never be beaten, extolled the Italian Communist Party’s cosying up to the Christian Democrats, and sponsored the Marxism Today gang as they galloped towards a political yuppieland of interviews with Tory ministers and columns in the Murdoch press.'

In particular, if while as a member of the Historians Group of the CPGB, twentieth century history was impossible to write, even when Hobsbawm did come to write the history of the twentieth century in Age of Extremes, his famous thesis about 'The Forward March of Labour Halted' meant he did not focus on the possibilities presented by working class struggles.  (There were other surprising omissions in Age of Extremes, such as the lack of mention of the struggles for black liberation in the US and even figures such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X are absent - and this from a jazz enthusiast and pioneering jazz historian (!) -  though this is perhaps understandable given Hobsbawm was writing a quite personal account of the century late on in his career rather than a 'total history').  Yet for all his limitations, ever since Hobsbawm joined the Communist movement in the early 1930s as a young Jewish socialist activist who decided to embrace the future rather than no future as Hitler's Nazis seized power in Germany - at possibly the darkest moment in the history of the century - up until his recent intellectual defence of Marx and Marxism in 'How to Change the World', his voluminous intellectual work over the course of his life represent a colossal, immense contribution to not only historical scholarship in general and Marxist scholarship in particular - but also a resource of hope that future generations can draw upon in the struggle for a socially just and equal world.  

I will add obituaries and tributes etc as and when I get time:

Guardian obituary
Ian Birchall in Socialist Worker
Paul Blackledge in Socialist Review
Neil Davidson for New Left Project
Mark Mazower in the Guardian
Mark Steel in the Independent
Ramachandra Guha in Prospect David Feldman Eric Foner in The Nation Matthew Cole
for Verso. Marc Mulholland in Jacobin
Tristram Hunt  in the Telegraph and Guardian
Evan Smith on Hobsbawm and '1956'.
Donald Sassoon on Open Democracy
Keith Flett for the London Socialist Historians Group
David Morgan and the Socialist History Society
See  also Daniel Pick, Ishan Cader, Nicholas Jacobs
and Jonathan Derbyshire
Listen to Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History
Articles in Past and Present Making History interview
Edited to add:  To take up and challenge all the points raised by the rabid but predictable anti-Communist attacks on Hobsbawm that have appeared over the last day or so from critics ranging from the Right to the 'pro-war Left' would be a true 'labour of Sisyphus', but perhaps the very worst and most disgraceful I have seen so far comes from A.N.Wilson in the Daily Mail.  Wilson - who might want to reflect on how his last book about Hitler  was received by historians of Nazi Germany (see for example Richard Evans in the New Statesman) before accusing anyone of writing 'badly written' books as he does of Hobsbawm, has penned perhaps the most appalling and insulting attempt at character assassination to date. He does not pause a moment to pay even the most begrudging of respects but launches straight in: 'He hated Britain and excused Stalin's genocide but was hero of the BBC and the Guardian Eric Hobsbawm a TRAITOR too?'  Wilson makes the slanderous accusation that Hobsbawm was a Soviet agent on the grounds that 'he was at Cambridge during the thirties and knew Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and other Soviet agents', and because he later wanted to read his MI5 file to find out who had 'snitched on him'.  This is it in terms of 'evidence', but who needs 'evidence' when you are A.N. Wilson writing in the Daily Mail and so can get away with inferring from this that therefore Hobsbawm must 'have done something of which the authorities were entitled to take a dim view - possibly something actively criminal'.   Hobsbawm was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain - ipso facto the authorities were going to be taking a 'dim view' of anything he did - actively 'criminal' or not.  Yet, the fact Hobsbawm was a political refugee in Britain, was a historian, and was a well known member of the CPGB means he would have been possibly the worst and most useless person for the Soviet Union to have had as an agent on lots of counts, and Hobsbawm's remark seems to have been a perfectly innocent inquiry into which individual was spying on him on behalf of the British state.  Wilson also accuses Hobsbawm of 'openly hating Britain' - and there are certain things Hobsbawm probably did 'openly hate' about Britain - its Empire and British imperialist crimes abroad for example, or the racism and anti-semitism at home that he would have encountered as a Jewish refugee from Nazism during the 1930s.  Such anti-semitism came from groups like the British Union of Fascists and newspapers who supported the Blackshirts like the er, Daily Mail (who were also cheering on Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in this period).  Yet one only needs to glance at Hobsbawm's voluminous writings on labour history and working class political traditions and culture to give the lie to the idea that Hobsbawm 'hated' British working class people.   As to Wilson's final suggestion that 'Hobsbawm himself will sink without trace...his books will not be read in the future' - well, while historians are not in general in the business of making predictions, I think this is one prediction that almost every historian can safely say will be proved wrong.   Whether anyone will read or remember A.N. Wilson after his passing is a far more open question...

Edited to also add: I wrote too soon - you can get even worse than Wilson - see  this Spectator piece by the poisonous Douglas Murray.

Who is this guy?

There are not many current Labour MPs who have made great political interventions of late, but yesterday one Gordon Brown, an obscure backbencher, rarely seen in parliament - possibly because he knows that parliament is only the rubber stamp for political decisions taken by those with real power outside it - rose to make a 32 minute long impassioned speech attacking the 'criminal media nexus' of Rupert Murdoch's News International corporation which engaged in 'law breaking on an industrial scale' and 'let the rats out the sewers'. His speech made Ed Miliband's 'leadership' of the Labour Party to date look embarrassing, and by the looks of things this Gordon Brown fellow could perhaps be a future Labour leader in waiting... Indeed - and though his may be going a bit too far based on one speech - this guy Brown looks like he'd make one hell of a prime-minister...

John Pilger on Murdoch's magical hypocrisy

'In 1995, Murdoch flew Tony and Cherie Blair first-class to Hayman Island, Australia, where the aspiring war criminal spoke about "the need for a new moral purpose in politics", which included the lifting of government regulations on the media. Murdoch shook his hand warmly. The next day the Sun commented: "Mr Blair has vision, he has purpose and he speaks our language on morality and family life..."

Edited to add:John Pilger and Socialist Worker's report on the latest News International phone-hacking scandal

New Film: The Labour Leader's Speech

...From the makers of the award-winning The King's Speech...

...Starring Oscar winner Colin Firth as Ed Miliband...

...Charlie Sheen as George Osbourne...

...Teri Hatcher, Rachel Weisz and Scarlett Johansson in Ed Miliband's dreams...

...and Ralph Miliband spinning in his grave

Comes the eagerly awaited... THE LABOUR LEADER'S SPEECH

The incredible story of the quiet man who found himself accidentally becoming leader of the Labour Party instead of his brother and was accordingly expected as the alleged official 'leader of the Opposition' to give voice to the hopes of millions on the TUC backed mass 'march for the alternative' on 26 March in London...will Ed make it to the march? Will he actually speak on the demo?

'I can't wait to hear Ed speak...the excitement and anticipation is unbearable'
Nobody

Revolutionary new cure for insomnia found?

Do you suffer from insomnia?

Fear not, a revolutionary new cure for insomnia may just be around the corner!

For years Dr Gordon Brown has dilligently been working at finding a cure for insomnnia. Over the years many thousands of people who suffer from sleep deprivation have found some relief from Dr. Brown's tireless labours in this field - and many hundreds of people have already bought such tried and tested products such as Courage, Britain's Everyday Heroes as well as such classic products as Moving Britain Forward: Speeches 1997–2006 and The Change We Choose: Speeches 2007-9.*

But now Dr. Brown thinks he may have found the perfect formula for tackling insomnia - and next month will see the exciting new release of Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalisation which promises to be the most comprehensive one-dose treatment for sleep deprivation ever put onto the market!**

'He has an incredible legacy: he improved the lives of millions of people here and around the world.'
One happy amnesia sufferer, Mr. E. Miliband pays tribute to Dr. Gordon Brown

*32 copies sold to date!

**Important Health warning. May have unexpected side-effects. Previous medicinal treatments of Dr. Brown's have induced nausea and vomiting. Moving Britain Forward: Speeches 1997–2006 for example may have included traces of such toxic ingredients as "No Return to Tory Boom and Bust under New Labour" and his speeches to City bankers: "You are the wealth creators, the men and women who make our nation more prosperous'', and "What you, as the City of London, have achieved for financial services we, as a government, now aspire to achieve for the whole economy". His Speeches 2007-9 may have included traces of the old British Union of Fascists' favourite "British Jobs for British workers" and, in another speech to bankers, "The financial services sector in Britain and the City of London at the centre of it, is a great example of a highly skilled, high value added, talent driven industry that shows how we can excel in a world of global competition. Britain needs more of the vigour, ingenuity and aspiration that you already demonstrate that is the hallmark of your success."

Big Society Bull Shit and Liberal Skidmarks

One of the best letters in Socialist Worker recently was short and to the point.

'David Cameron talks about the “Big Society”, but what does that mean? For me, it means BS. If you don’t know what BS stands for, then you don’t know what Cameron is talking.'

There is probably more to the Tories Big Society agenda and idea than meets the eye, but at least as the Con-Dem cuts begin to come thick and fast (and while the cuts can't really get much 'thicker' than they already are, they are unfortunately set to come 'faster' next week), the current state of British politics begins to become clearer than ever. It is not a pretty sight. Just as Mark Twain once noted that 'it could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class, except Congress', it is without doubt that the front benches of the British Houses of Parliament will go down in history as the scene of all manner of crimes, many of them being currently committed on a daily basis.

However, the fact that it is the Liberal Democrats who are currently so fervently fronting the most vicious criminal Tory attacks waged on behalf of the richest people in the country against the very poorest is providing some grim humour amid the carnage being inflicted on Britain's social fabric. Loathe as I am as a socialist to quote a capitalist overlord on the disaster now unfolding,Alan Sugar (of 'The Apprentice' fame) probably reflects the views of many:

'One thing that's for sure, this coalition thing is an absolute joke. It's got to be sorted out. It can't last for long with these Lib Dems and all that. These two people, [Nick] Clegg and [Vince] Cable, in their heart of hearts never thought they would get into power, now it's as if [low level football club] Leyton Orient suddenly found themselves in the Champions League. Fish out of water! Unbelievable! They don't know what they are doing! I think Cable should ... he should just give it up. They should put him in a field somewhere and give him a bit of hay.'

While it is manifestly the case that the former Labour councillor turned Business Secretary for the current Tory coalition Vince Cable, despite his oddly quixotic attacks on 'capitalism', is no Marxist, there is one thing from Marx that he seems to have taken to heart. 'Politics', Marx once noted, 'is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.' That was Groucho of course - rather than Karl - but it seems to accurately sum up the current pathetic political disposition of the Liberal Democrats in power, and Cable in particular, as they embrace wholeheartedly the Tories austerity agenda and betray an ever-increasing number of their pre-election manifesto pledges in the process - above all most dramatically over tuition fees. It is true that, as Cable stated in parliament, 'The road to Westminster is covered with the skid marks of political parties changing direction', but wasn't this coalition meant to be allegedly about 'new politics' rather than 'power-for-power's sake', and all about 'honesty', 'fairness', 'transparency', accountability'? If the Liberal parliamentarians are largely 'Yellow Tories', one should also not forget the 'Red Tory' scum working with the government either, the likes of Lord John Hutton, Frank Field and Alan Milburn - all still nominally members of the Labour Party. One cannot fail but be reminded of the point the great Marxist historian CLR James once made, that Liberals and Social Democrats were 'the comedians of the modern political world'.

Yet what is also apparent is that while British politics looks set to revert at the next election back to a two-party affair between Labour and the Tories whatever Labour do between now and then, up to now the new leaders of the Labour Party have really failed to effectively hammer either the millionaire Tories or the skidmarking Liberals. This is largely because so many of them are Blairites through and through (witness Tessa Jowell's pretty abysmal performance on Question Time this week) and so can't effectively oppose say the marketisation of higher education as they were the original architects of that policy. As one Labour MP noted, the new Labour shadow cabinet 'is packed with the Blairite Tendency, several of the militant brand, and their influence is not to be under-estimated...There is not a single person in the Shadow Cabinet who could be described as a natural left-winger'.

Fortunately, a rising mood of militancy is developing in the British trade union movement, at least among the rank-and-file. Moreover, while the trade union leaders are verbally committed to organising co-ordinated resistance - in some cases they are actually now doing so - for example the NUS/UCU demonstration for education on 10 November in London promises to be huge. Such sparks and flames of resistance have to be fanned by socialists over the coming weeks in months if we are to get anything approaching the general strikes and general level of struggle of say France and Greece. Moreover, if we do not try and organise collective mass resistance to the Blue, Yellow and Red Tory scum amidst this economic crisis, and leave people to try and survive the onslaught on public services and accompanying jobs massacre in their own individual ways then a recent poll in Germany reminds us of the continuing danger of the rise of fascism on the back of racist scapegoating of immigrants and Islamophobia. A study published this week saw one in 10 Germans profess they would like a "Führer" figure to "govern Germany with a hard hand", while 35% said they considered the country to be "dangerously overrun" with foreigners. The national demonstration and carnival against racism, fascism and Islamophobia called by Unite Against Fascism and Love Music Hate Racism and backed by the TUC and the Muslim Council of Britain should also be a date in people's diaries to try and help stop similar sentiments taking hold here. Things are more unstable and uncertain in British politics right now than in my living memory at least, and there are openings emerging for socialists that provide opportunities to make our case for a new society based on people's needs rather than private profits that have not existed for a very long time, and we need to make the most of them.

Some early thoughts on Ed Miliband's victory

The victory of Ed Miliband - 'the candidate of the trade union bureaucracy' as Socialist Worker put it, against his brother David, 'the candidate of the New Labour bureaucracy' is remarkable - and certainly to be celebrated as a victory over all the very worst rotten pro-capitalist pro-war reactionary elements of the Labour Party (as well as leaving a nice amount of egg on the face of one time leading Labour left-winger Dennis Skinner) . Whichever Miliband won the election would have had - and Ed now has - a very good chance of being the next Prime Minister, but clearly the majority of grassroots Labour activists understood Ed Miliband would be a better bet to rebuild the Party itself than his brother - who as a former Foreign Secretary who fervently supported the criminal and disastrous imperialist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would hardly be ideal to try and remove the stench of corruption and clean up the stains of blood left by the Blair-Brown years.

In his speech, Ed Miliband accordingly made the following pledge:

"The Labour Party in the future must be a vehicle that doesn't just attract thousands of young people but tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of young people who see us as their voice in British politics today...Today a new generation has taken charge of Labour, a new generation that understands the call of change...Today's election turns the page because a new generation has stepped forward to serve our party and in time I hope to serve our country. Today the work of the new generation begins."

I have no doubt lots of young idealistic people will indeed now rally behind a Ed Miliband led Labour Party, particularly given the growing moral and political bankrupcy of the Tory Boys currently running the Lib Dems. But whether young people who take the idea of socialism seriously should now join the Labour Party is another question - and one that for an answer people could do far worse than read the thoughts of the great Marxist Ralph Miliband - Ed's father. In 1966, Ralph Miliband, commenting on Harold Wilson, noted that 'when Mr. Wilson so unexpectedly became leader of the Labour Party, many people on the Left thought that their situation had been drastically changed, and that left-wing voices would at long last be effectively heard at the highest reaches of Labour policy-making.'

Such illusions were soon to be proved wrong - not least after Wilson became Prime Minister in 1964. But for Ralph Miliband, the idea of 'parliamentary socialism' itself through the Labour Party was a flawed strategy - and socialists would be better off trying to build up a socialist alternative to the Labour Party from below:

'It is absurd to think that the men who now rule the Labour Party, and who will go on ruling it, will ever want, or would agree under pressure, to push the Labour Party in socialist directions, and to show the resolution, single-mindedness and staying-power which such reorientation would require. Carthorses should not be expected to win the Derby. To believe, against all the weight of accumulated evidence, that the Labour leaders can, for instance, be made to adopt a “socialist foreign policy” if it is presented to them in sufficiently alluring terms is pure delusion, on a par with Robert Owen’s hope that Metternich would act on the plan for a Co-operative Commonwealth of Europe which Owen presented to him at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818...It may be that the Labour leaders lack the knowledge to apply socialist policies: but what they lack even more, and irremediably, is the will.

What this amounts to is that the Labour Party is and will remain as much of a non-socialist party as it has ever been, with its leaders providing a Lib-Lab, non-socialist alternative to the Conservative Party. This does not mean that the two parties are now “the same”. They are in fact very different, in terms of the kind of people who mainly vote for each party, in terms of their membership and the aspirations of their activists. But the parliamentary leaders of the Labour Party (and the point applies, though to a lesser degree to the leaders of the Conservative Party) have always been able to attenuate the political expression of these differences to the point where they do not, in concrete terms, endanger the “neo-capitalist” framework which both party leaderships now accept as permanent.

However, even this common acceptance of “neo-capitalism” as permanent does not eliminate all differences between the two party leaderships; there remains plenty of room for political divergence and controversy over economic and social policy. Even the task of strengthening British capitalism, to which the Labour leaders are dedicated, is not one that can be pursued, particularly by a Labour Government, without arousing hostility on the part of many interests well represented in the Conservative Party.

This reproduces, though at a different level, a situation which endured for the best part of the nineteenth century as between the Tory and Liberal parties. These parties were not by any means “the same”; but, as Lord Balfour noted in a famous Introduction to Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution, their “alternating Cabinets, though belonging to different Parties ... never differed about the foundations of society”. It was at one time thought that, with the emergence of the Labour Party as the main opposition, the confrontation had assumed an altogether different character and that what now divided the parties did concern “the foundations of society”.

It may be difficult for socialists inside the Labour Party to accept that this was a mistaken interpretation, and that there is no genuine likelihood of it ever coming to correspond to reality. It is the more difficult to accept this in that the Labour Party remains the “party of the working class”, and that there is, in this sense, no serious alternative to it at present. This, of course, has always been the central dilemma of British Socialism, and it is not a dilemma which is likely to be soon resolved. But the necessary first step in that direction is to take a realistic view of the Labour Party, of what it can and of what it cannot be expected to do. For it is only on the basis of such a view that socialists can begin to discuss their most important task of all, which is the creation of an authentic socialist movement in Britain.

Ralph Miliband on the perils of 'humanitarian intervention' in Afghanistan

'...Almost by definition, a regime imposed upon a hostile population by foreign arms (or for that matter without the help of foreign arms) will be strongly repressive: opposition must be put down, civil rights must be denied, and civic life must be severely controlled, and thereby impoverished. This also deeply affects economic life and activity...The result is resistance or at best indifference, inefficiency and corruption. Poor performance and non-cooperation aggravate economic difficulties; and these in turn enhance popular dissatisfaction.

In this perspective, the notion that these regimes can eventually come to enjoy a large and growing measure of popular support must appear illusory. For not only are they deeply marked by their dependence on foreign intervention for survival (and for the most part by their origin in foreign intervention); but also by the essential nature of the regimes which military intervention (or the threat of foreign intervention) serves to maintain. The point is that the regimes in question are not simply monopolistic and repressive from temporary necessity and transient adverse circumstances, but by their very structure...

[There] is the argument that, whatever may be said against military intervention in most cases, it is defensible in some exceptional cases, namely in the case of particularly tyrannical and murderous regimes, for instance the regime of Idi Amin in Uganda and of Pol Pot in Kampuchea...The argument is obviously attractive: one cannot but breathe a sigh of relief when an exceptionally vicious tyranny is overthrown. But attractive though the argument is, it is also dangerous. For who is to decide, and on what criteria, that a regime has become sufficiently tyrannical to justify overthrow by military intervention? There is no good answer to this sort of question; and acceptance of the legitimacy of military intervention on the ground of the exceptionally tyrannical nature of a regime opens the way to even more military adventurism, predatoriness, conquest and subjugation than is already rife in the world today.

The rejection of military intervention on this score is not meant to claim immunity and protection for tyrannical regimes. Nor does it. For there are other forms of intervention than military ones: for instance economic pressure by way of sanctions, boycott and even blockade. Tyrannical regimes make opposition extremely difficult: but they do not make it impossible. And the point is to help internal opposition rather than engage in military ‘substitutism’...

’Security’ is perhaps the reason most commonly invoked to justify military intervention...In considering this argument, much confusion may be avoided if a clear distinction is made between two essentially different propositions. The first of these is that it is useful and desirable for any given country to have uncontentious, cooperative and friendly neighbours. This is indisputable. The second proposition is that the requirements of security do not only make it useful and desirable for this or that country to have such neighbours, but essential, to the point, where possible, of justifying military intervention when the requirements threaten to be no longer met. I think that this second proposition is dangerous and unacceptable from a socialist standpoint, and that it rests on short-sighted and mistaken calculations...

In any case, security by virtue of occupation, and the maintenance of power of a puppet regime must be set against a number of contrary considerations. One of these is the fierce hostility which military intervention generates and the nationalist upsurge it produces. ‘Security’ is here turned into a mockery by the massive unpopularity of the occupier and his puppet government; and it is further degraded by the war of pacification which [the occupier has to pursue], with all its attendant horrors. What kind of security is this? It was in relation to American military strategists that C. Wright Mills coined the phrase ‘crackpot realism’...'

Ralph Miliband, 'Military Intervention and
Socialist Internationalism' (1980) .

Some holiday reading for his warmongering son David and David's brother Ed perhaps?