"What would it mean in Britain to renew the left?"
This piece has been circulating in a couple of social media networks, and I thought it would be useful to give it an airing here. It is the sort of reflection I assumed a SYRIZA victory would likely generate on the autonomist left in Britain. I would probably demur from some of its analyses and many of its conclusions, or at least I think they can be usefully questioned or pushed further (what does it mean for a party to ‘be a weapon of the social movements’, and is that relationship sustainable? If there is the absence of a party turn by post-2010 horizontalists, fluffy or otherwise, is this just because of the absence of a 'pole of attraction’? Is there really an absence of 'identity politics’ in Greece, or a suspension of mistrust just as a result of dire necessity? Why are the lines in the sand drawn as they are – Assange is fine but Bolshevism is a danger? And many more.)
For all those questions, I do think it is useful to engage in this longer-term, broader strategic thinking, even if the question of “how to replicate SYRIZA?” is a bad one for the UK context. It seems to ignore the long background to both the Greek and Spanish electoral turns, which is in social movements that are more active and more generally present in consciousness than in Britain. I don’t much care about the history of why this is the case, just that it is so: it means that there is simply less of a groundwork for a popular left dissent, even if what one might broadly call “left” ideas sometimes seem wildly popular. This is only partly a matter of undead Labourism, and won’t solve itself mechanically just by the Labour Party collapsing.
What is most useful for me here is a stimulus to thinking about mass organisation, by which I assume we must mean more than our own organisations increasing their membership by one or two orders of magnitude. I think it’s important to say we only have some idea of what that looks like in practice. Regardless of what you think of SYRIZA’s programme – I think it is both overpraised and unlikely to be achieved – the rise of a British social democratic left movement as something more vital than a 'front’ for the same old-same old would require us to think clearly about how we relate to it. I remarked on a recent show that we can underestimate how powerfully motivating a sense of belonging to a movement can be, especially when that movement seems actually to be moving. I think one of the key difficulties is in fostering a broad sense of a genuinely social movement that extends across the country and throughout the working class, understood in its broadest sense.
There are, I suspect, two further lessons coming down the pipeline from SYRIZA’s success. The first is confrontation with the real mechanisms of international governance, which have limited (if any) democratic oversight, and do not condescend to be changed by the mere will of the populace. This will likely pose some challenges to electoralists, or those who lay stress on elections. The other, which follows on from this, is what action it is possible to take in the case of ruling institutions that refuse to respond even to duly-elected left governments. If we have understood the electoral sphere, historically, as being the sphere to which the threat of a general strike is subordinated (i.e., for a stake in power, we guarantee that we do not bring the country to its knees), and whatever one thinks of that compromise, what do we do when the political sphere is now insufficient to exert power, and the general strike (or its partial one-day, some-occupations variant) now exerts less of a threat? We need to rethink how far that weapon goes, how it might be refined.
(The other issue here is sovereignty. The useful way of thinking about sovereignty that ultimately comes from Hobbes is to do with force: whoever has deciding force is sovereign. Some modern liberals suggest that this isn’t the way modern states work, and that contemporary liberalism has successfully distributed power so no single deciding force exists, or doesn’t exist in a way that is actually operative. The surprisingly recent history of military dictatorships might suggest somewhat otherwise. In any case, I mention this only to suggest we might need to think about what 'force’ means here, for us.)
Lastly, I like the pen-name this author has chosen: Alexander Trocchi is an author worth reading. Perhaps it also suggests why they look fondly on the possibility of a Red Clydeside.
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What would it mean in Britain to renew the left?
A Trocchi 29 Jan 2015
1. Syriza’s victory was reliant on a large number of local factors
a. A long-term, large excluded left culture, spanning generations
b. The worst austerity ever inflicted on a modern country
c. The collapse of Pasok (and Dimar) as escape valves for anger
d. The flirtation of sections of ND and the ruling elite with Golden Dawn
e. An extant “bolshevik” apparatus and culture among Syriza’s cadres, albeit colonised by a left-social democratic leadership group
f. Self-destructed far left, with the remnants acting as loyal, non-destructive left wing of main party
g. Many fluffy horizontalists joined Syriza after 2011
h. Large and heterogeneous social movement scene
i. No massively contentious and deal-breaking issues around feminism, gay rights, transgender and race etc. Syriza seen as sympathetic champion by relatively powerless oppressed groups; low salience of identity politics in Greece
j. State funding for parliamentary parties, allowing an appartus, campaign funds and policy support
k. In the final phase of the campaign, to recruit and retain political elements to the right and left, creating a hegemonic surge.
l. No strong Islamist Left – ie no Galloway, no Tower Hamlets etc
2. The universal takeaways are
a. Be a party, with an open, confident and charismatic leader, capable of professionalism in the parliamentary and diplomatic arenas
b. In opposition, look like a potential government
c. The party as a weapon of the social movements, not a channel or vessel for it.
d. Self-restraint by sectarian groups; their self-destruction and exclusion otherwise
e. The ability to recruit and promote activists from widely varying backgrounds, including horizontalism
f. Primacy of programme, not ideology. If you fight for the programme you are in.
g. Understanding that to create and retain deep roots all of the above has to apply; have a close knit leadership group that understands it.
3. Parallels in Britain
a. Only in Scotland has a situation arisen where a Syriza style party could have prospered, during the Indyref campaign. For now the forces that could form it are in the RIC, the SSP and its periphery, the Scottish Greens and the left of the SNP. But failure to form a radical indy party means no further developments until after May 2015.
b. The student and Occupy movements of 2010/11 threw up many activists and thinkers who could be the core of a Syriza or Podemos style movement. But they remained horizontalist; and no pole of attraction exists as per Syriza or Podemos
c. Community organising by Church/anti-socialist activists (eg Citizens UK) is strong.
d. Austerity has been weak in Britain; Osborne was forced to back-load fiscal austerity, hitting mainly the very poor and public sector workers. It has been softened by 375bn of QE money, where Greece had none. Therefore the apparatus of British 2-party poltiics remains strong, albeit hollowed out from within.
e. In Britain the unions are decisive. Most leftists conceive the class struggle in terms of the workplace and unions (Syriza never did). And there are strong forces pushing the unions towards a break with Labour should it (a) fail to win in 2015 and (b) get taken over by the a Blairite/Blue Labour coalition, both of whom disdain the unions.
f. Identity politics are high among activists and among the wider audience for radical ideas; “split issues” include support for Julian Assange, support for transgender rights, caucusing and self organisation, sex workers’ rights, and intolerance of sexist attitudes and behaviour by male activists. Also issues like Israel, or Russia (there are pro Putin and pro Israel left groups in Britain). Any one of these, at the intensity experienced in the UK, would have torn Syriza apart had Greek leftists cared about them.
4. What did Syriza create?
a. Ultimately it created a social democratic left party, with competent leaders and policymakers, able to command mass support via longterm and consistent work in communities, from villages to slums to bohemia to the manual working class.
5. To replicate this in Britain you would need:
a. Unions. There is no state funding and no mass leftist culture. The unions would have to turn their training schools, websites, organisers etc over en masse to a new party.
b. A “party turn” by horizontalists. That is, they would have to recognise that despite hierarchical power structures being rubbish, you have to work within them, while pursuing your own project.
c. An ultra-benign and inclusive structure for the party. Everybody who wants to can be in it: there are no exclusions for people who support Julian Assange, or diss transgender rights, or dislike Islamism, or are soft on Islamism.
d. An end to attempts to form “socialist parties”. The pro-Syriza project in the UK would explicitly state that groups with bolshevik methods and ideologies could not take part. Also any idea of entrist “doublespeak” would be ruled out: this is a real party, whose members mean what they say; it is non-revolutionary, horizontalist in spirit; it aims to carve out a parliamentary majority for a radical social justice agenda.
e. A strong, competent leadership. Tsipras strength came form his competence and charisma, not just hours spent workign an internal machine. You would need a leadership group that trusted each other in the logn term, were loyal to the project not their own power base.
6. The potential positive scenario
a. May 2015: The Greens score 8% but get only one or two MPs. Their membership rockets, especially in Scotland and English university towns.
b. The SNP hammers Labour. Labour fails to win majority but walks away from coalition with SNP towards opposition, and breakup or even worse towards grand coalition with pro-EU Tories. Tories split as UKIP maintains pressure on them.
c. In any rightward move of Labour, Unite and the GMB split. They take about 25 MPs.
d. A Radical Left Party is formed. Key fragments from UK Trotskyism and automomism agree to self-regulate, and dissolve into the party, not enter it. To enter, groups have to do so as whole groups, and disavow bolshevism. That keeps the destructive nutters out.
e. The party fosters a wider movement of movements, in which the various clashing ideologies of radicalism are kept far enough apart from each other to avoid the whole thing becoming an anti-privilege bunfight.
f. In an October election, this Radical Left party does an electoral deal with the Greens and the SNP to stand as a single coalition on : Scrap Trident, Scottish Fiscal Autonomy and a New Referendum, End Austerity and use the Bank of England’s printing press, and sterling manipulation, to kickstart growth.
g. It wins a decent number of seats, while the Blairite-led Labour party shatters, its fragments form a government with Cameron/Osborne and Clegg.
h. 2015-2020 the Radical Left grows to become the official opposition party, while an ecosystem of social movements is fostered in the political space at the grasroots.
i. An alternative is; the Greens do much better and, as in Scotland, they become the must-join party for the emerging social movement and freed-up unions; but those unions very conservative on Green issues, so not likely.
7. None of this puts the left in power, as the UK economic crisis is not as deep; but its political crisis is just as deep as the Greek centre – espcailly if the right falls apart over the EU.
8. I remain convinced that the most likely path to a radical left experiment with power in the UK lies through an independent Scotland and a Clydeside commune.
ENDS
