A world to win: class struggle and the Communist Manifesto

A young Karl Marx

In August I gave a talk on the Communist Manifesto at an event organised by Counterfire in Newcastle. I have just got around to collating my notes into readable form. I built my presentation, which focused especially on themes of history and class struggle in the Manifesto (two other sessions addressed different aspects), around a series of quotations from the original text. Here we go...

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Marx and Engels were commissioned to write a manifesto for the Communist League in late 1847. Economic crisis had affected much of Europe in the previous couple of years. Revolution was in the air. Communists were making connections across borders and beginning to get organised, but were still small in number. The opening line of the Manifesto -  ‘A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.’ – was more wishful thinking than accurate description.

Engels had drafted something in rather dry question-and-answer form, but it was Marx who turned this – in the space of a few weeks at the start of 1848 – into what would become the most widely-read, influential and famous political pamphlet ever published. It was the culmination of several years’ intellectual and political development in Marx’s thinking, an attempt to state clearly what communists stood for.

There was a culture of secret and conspiratorial societies at the time, but Marx and Engels rejected this. If the emancipation of the working class is to be the act of the working class, there is little purpose served by secrecy. Ideas must be stated openly and persuasively.

By the time it was published, revolution had broken out in a number of parts of Europe – 1848 would turn out to be an historic year of revolutionary upheaval, though most of it defeated. The Manifesto in fact turned out to be something quite different to what might be expected. It almost entirely avoided specific policy prescriptions. It contained a broad survey of historical development rather than keeping its attention trained on present politics. It was expressed in often powerful, even poetic, language.

At the core of the Manifesto is a particular conception of history and how change happens: an understanding of society as being divided, fundamentally, into classes, and history as a succession of class societies (and class struggles).  Marx writes:

'The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another.’

This is an important starting point: class is the main dividing line in society. This is not unique to capitalism , but rather has been true for thousands of years. It is a division that inevitably engenders conflict too.

Marx then provides a sweeping survey of the development of early capitalism, moving on to the era of industrial capitalism through which he was living:

'Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie.’

So, capitalism grew out of an earlier feudal society. Merchant capitalism increasingly replaced feudal relations, and in turn this grew into industrial capitalism. A new urban elite developed: the bourgeoisie. Although Marx refers to ‘two great classes’, this shouldn’t be taken to indicate anything about their size: the proletariat, those who do the work, are far greater in number than those who live off the surplus their labour produces. Marx specifically traces the growth of industry:

‘Steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.’

This kind of language is almost celebratory – and the tone often surprises first-time readers, expecting virulent denunciation of capitalism’s evils from the beginning. Of course Marx doesn’t leave it there, but he does take time to extol the progress represented by capitalism’s development. He writes of the revolutionising role played by capitalism, its economically dynamic quality and the way that overturns many established certainties:

‘All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.’

Marx and Engels had first met a few years earlier (and went on to be lifelong collaborators). In 1844 Engels wrote ‘The Condition of the working class in England’ about the impact of industrial capitalism on the living and working conditions of those drawn into the newly mushrooming cities. It was an ugly and unromantic picture. Marx and Engels had no illusions about the often grim reality of industrial capitalism for the proletariat, the working class.

What they grasped was how capitalism accelerated the pace of technological and economic change, went together with the growth of major cities and created greater opportunities for wealth (largely concentrated, though, among a tiny class of those who owned and controlled the means of production).

The development of the modern nation state went together with the growth of capitalism. This was a deeply contested process. The English, American and French revolutions were all, whatever their differences, about the rising bourgeois class asserting itself against the barriers inherited from late feudalism. Political revolutions, with varying degrees of success, accompanied the economic changes. Marx wrote:

‘Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.’

1848 was itself a year of bourgeois revolution. Although mostly unsuccessful, the uprisings left their mark – and in the decades that followed there was much greater political unification and centralisation in many parts of Europe, (limited) advances in democratic reform, the strengthening of modern state institutions (e.g. police forces), and so on.

But capitalism did something else, something enormously important for Marx, Engels and their comrades in the small Communist League. It created the working class. It brought together large numbers of workers in factories, mills and elsewhere - a process that was dangerous for the capitalists:

‘The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.’

There is a lot packed in to this quotation. Firstly, it is identifying that growing industry brought turned people who had previously worked on the land, or perhaps as artisans, into workers - wage-labourers dependent on selling their labour power to the capitalist to make a living. Secondly, proletarianisation (working class formation) is a collective process, bringing workers together in combination. So, too, is proletarian resistance to capitalism a collective matter. Workers’ power is not as individuals, but as a collective force.  Finally, this collective power of workers is so potentially great that it can defeat the bourgeoisie and end capitalism, a system that has paradoxically created its own gravedigger.

Marx’s account of history, specifically the rise and development of capitalism (and the potential for moving from capitalism to socialism), therefore has class division at its heart, but also an awareness of the centrality of class struggle. The division into classes, and the exploitation at the heart of class relationships, inevitably generates conflict over what is produced and how the surplus wealth is allocated.

But Marx also had interesting things to say about the battle of ideas in society, and how that is shaped by material realities. Imagining himself addressing the bourgeois class, he wrote:

‘The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property – historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production – this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you.’

This is a brutal warning and a reality check. Every ruling class imagines its own ideas and values to be a kind of ‘common sense’: universal values, taken for granted and seemingly obvious. In fact ideas change over time. The dominant ideology of one age may later seem antiquated. Changing ideas are shaped by material changes in the conditions of society: ‘the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property’.

History moves forward. Material production – the forces and relations of production – changes over time. So, with it, do the dominant ideas change:

‘What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.’

Marx points here to another vital aspect of ideology: it is the ideas of the ruling elite that are universalised as the ideas of a whole society. Whether through control of state religion, or schools and universities, or the media, the ruling class – the tiny elite possessing wealth and power – asserts its own ideas and values.

Yet there is no fatalism in the Manifesto. Running through it is an acute consciousness of historical change – transformation indeed – and the potential for further transformation in the future. The working class, identified as the collective agent of transformation, is not doomed to be tied to the ruling ideology. It is driven to resist by exploitation.

The working class is gathered together in large numbers and can organise collectively. Writing against the backdrop of Chartism, a mass working class movement coming to its end in 1848, Marx and Engels were aware of what was possible. There had been the earliest examples of strike action by the 1840s. There had been early efforts at building trade unions.

The class that can organise and resist collectively, can also set about creating a new world – one characterised by co-operation, equality and democracy, not the rule of the few over the many. There is little detail on what a communist or socialist society might look like, but this is a starting point:

‘In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’

So communism is, ultimately, to be a classless society. And in that state of equality and interdependence lies the potential for human development and liberation. But there’s also recognition that such a future vision must be linked to current struggles, if it is to be anything more than a utopian dream. Marx succinctly outlines the tasks of communists:

‘In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.’

Three points here, all of them acutely relevant as the Manifesto was circulated amidst growing revolutionary tumult in 1848: communists support democratic or bourgeois revolutions (whatever their limitations might be), working class economic and social interests (‘the property question’) must always be forefront, and the movement must be international, uniting workers across national boundaries and opposing a common enemy. Class, not nationhood, is what unites us.

The Manifesto ends, then, with these stirring words:

‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!’

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We (still) need to talk about class

My review of 'Socialist Register 2015: Transforming Classes', eds. Leo Panitch and Greg Albo (Merlin Press 2014), was originally published on Counterfire.

The 2015 volume of Socialist Register, the annual journal of left-wing theory dating back to the 1960s, continues the same broad theme as last year’s volume (which I also reviewed for Counterfire). Both issues of the journal are concerned with contemporary changes in class structure and class politics.

Taken together, these two volumes are a concerted reassertion of the centrality of class to understanding society and to mapping the future of radical and left politics. This is at a time when class is an unfashionable concept and the working class is widely viewed as no longer a collective agent of social change.

At times it feels like the contributions are so diverse that the theme - transforming classes - is rather too loose. The ruling class, the middle class and the working class are all covered, with the last of these receiving the lion’s share of attention. There is truly global coverage, with the eighteen essays (mostly by left-wing academics with an intellectual background in Marxism) including contributions on China, India, South Africa, Turkey, Egypt, Brazil and Chile. This year there is very little specifically on Britain – or in fact anywhere in Europe – while there is a lively series of four interlinked essays devoted to working-class politics, resistance and organisation in the US.

The collection is very disparate, but there are a number of basic political ideas that are just about universally shared among the contributors. They still regard class as a relevant concept; indeed, they typically see it as the fundamental division and relationship in society. The volume as a whole asserts the continuing centrality of class to making sense of the world we live in, through tracing the specific changes taking place in class composition or in the balance of forces between classes. This combination of fidelity to viewing class as the dominant social relationship and flexibility in relating that to evolving conditions is a great strength.

It is also the case that contributors, as might be expected in a socialist journal, adopt a partisan standpoint of support for working-class interests and for various forms of working-class resistance and organisation. For me, probably the most interesting and useful dimension of the volume is precisely the analysis of concrete examples of working-class politics, resistance and organisation, which comes through strongly in several contributions. The backdrop here is the impact of 35 years of neoliberalism, a sustained effort to shift the balance between capital and labour in favour of the former.

As the editors, Leo Panitch and Greg Albo, note in their preface: inequality has grown ‘in the political conditions and social struggles allowing the spread and deepening of capitalist social relations’ (Preface, p.x). The 2014 and 2015 volumes combined should, I think, be seen as a major project in charting the impact of neoliberalism on class relations and class politics globally, with special attention paid to those hopeful developments in working-class organisation that point to a different future.

A substantial essay by Susan Ferguson and David McNally is especially pertinent at the time of writing, as it explores the role of migration in contemporary working-class formation. It is a sophisticated analysis which weaves together different elements within a ‘social reproduction’ framework, doing an excellent job of highlighting the centrality of migrant labour to global capitalism and exploring what that means for migrant workers and their families.

There is a little too much academic jargon, but the arguments and ideas are valuable. The authors thoughtfully consider the intersections of class, gender and race in a broadly Marxist framework, always alert to the fundamental role of the economy in shaping society – and to the experience of work as integral to working-class experience – without being reductive.

The politics of the ruling class

The re-shaping of the ruling class is an important theme in a number of essays, most dramatically in Lin Chun’s piece on China. The topic is hugely important considering the remarkable economic growth of China in recent years, and very topical as I write this because of the financial turmoil in the country. The essay examines how China has been transformed as it has opened up to capitalist globalisation.

Alongside this there has been a shift in Chinese ruling-class discourse, balancing precariously between the supposed benefits of an increasingly neoliberal model and the old rhetoric of state Communism. An intriguing aspect of the shifting discourse is the complete invisibility of any reference to class, which would of course point towards the social inequalities in China and, even more dangerously, to the notion that a collective force may exist that can change society.

Achin Vanaik, writing on India, is also perceptive about the shifts in ruling-class and dominant politics, including the ideas and language deployed to sustain ruling-class power.  It is an excellent attempt at explaining how the reactionary BJP has come to replace the traditionally dominant Indian National Congress as the country’s most successful political party. It analyses the political crisis of the old order, and its roots, while looking at the social base of the BJP. The growth of the middle class is indispensable to understanding this, though Vanaik avoids any simplistic reductionism.

The other key reference point is something dating back to the late 1980s: ‘a neoliberal turn in the economy being accompanied by the rise of a Hindutava-influenced consolidation of ‘common sense’ socially and a stronger authoritarian inflection politically’ (p.57).

Developments in the working class

Two very different contributions focus on the middle class in particular: John McCullough writes about Hollywood representations of the middle class over time, while Randy Martin asks ‘what happened to the professional middle class?’

However, it is those which focus on the working class that really form the main body of this volume. These essays allow much greater scope for discussing class struggle and political action, as well as tracing developments in work and in the material composition of the working class. Two essays especially are fascinating on the complex developments in working-class movements in recent years: one on South Africa, the other on Egypt.

Sam Ashman and Nicolas Pons-Vignon assess the problems with successive ANC governments in South Africa and how the once mighty movement, which united many behind its banner in fighting to end apartheid, has been deeply compromised by administering cuts and privatisations in office. However, what is most interesting is the focus on developing alternatives: in the union movement, in the social movements, and in the field of electoral politics, with some valuable insight into how these interact with each other.

The great trade-union federation COSATU has suffered a crisis precisely because of its relationship to the ANC government, leading to some hopeful fresh developments. The metalworkers’ union NUMSA has moved to the left and been in repeated conflict with the ANC. The authors conclude:

‘The fact that the current contestation in South Africa, driven by a radical union and involving a growing number of workers, combines a powerful counter-movement to neoliberalism with a socialist political vision is of global significance’ (p.108).

Joel Beinin and Marie Duboc focus on workers’ struggles in Egypt since the revolution overthrew Mubarak in early 2011. It is refreshing to see such close attention to this vital dimension of Egypt’s upheavals in recent years. The essay charts the long-term development of labour movement struggles over some years – before and after the revolution – and identifies pre-2011 strikes as a major stream flowing into the revolutionary events.

It also draws attention to the role of the long-term neoliberal restructuring of the Egyptian economy in fuelling working-class revolt. It ends with a sober assessment of Egyptian politics, as of 2014, acknowledging that the left’s failure to develop a coherent and organised political alternative to mainstream political forces has been (and remains) a huge obstacle to positive social and economic change.

Class in the 21st century

Perhaps the most wide-ranging contribution is by Hugo Radice; his ‘Class theory and class politics today’ is as sweeping as its title suggests. Radice’s starting point is the BBC survey in 2013 which posited seven different classes in modern British society. He recognises that this model reflects genuine fragmentation in society, but is also critical of it, not least because it fails to identify how social classes interact with each other and it doesn’t involve any sense of class struggle.

He suggests that we need class analysis that wrestles with both increased polarisation and increased fragmentation, and which grasps social conflict between classes (and the significance of it for how we evolve as a society).

This leads him on to direct engagement with Marx’s writings, and their relevance today, and an interesting discussion of the middle class, its composition and relationship to other classes. He is sensitive to different to Marxist interpretations of the middle class and provides a thought-provoking summary of how the middle class has evolved.

Radice concludes with some welcome observations on the continuing importance of work as central to how class divisions are created and reproduced, also identifying a few important trends in the world of work under the impact of neoliberalism. His comments on resistance and organisation at work, though, are rather vaguer and very much under-developed.

The American working class

The volume concludes with a series of four pieces on the American working class, its politics and organisations, which taken together are referred to as a ‘symposium’ on Labour and the left in the USA. I found these fascinating, especially when read in conjunction with each other. Although there’s no direct dialogue between them, there is a sense of coherence and of different contributions adding up to an overall understanding of the topic.

Kim Moody and Charles Post, in a jointly authored piece, provide a useful overview of the long-term decline of the power of labour in American society, tracing the numerical decline, bureaucratisation and hollowing out of unions. They analyse the relationship between this and major economic changes and policies during the last few decades.

However, they also – more hopefully – summarise some strategies for renewal, referring to concrete examples of what has already been done and indicating what might be worth generalising. Campaigning by fast-food workers and their supporters is one good example; the movement of Chicago teachers is another. These are examples of struggles that have incorporated social movement tactics and been tied up with union recruitment and capacity building.

It is the concrete struggles and forms of organising that provide most of the material for the other three contributions to the symposium. One called ‘New working-class organization and the social-movement left’ develops the theme of the interaction between traditional workers’ organisations and methods of struggles with social movements and the issues they champion. The range of examples is tremendously insightful and provides a powerful sense of how the labour movement might potentially be built anew.

Another piece takes a long view, examining the evolution of working-class struggle and organisation from the post-war boom onwards, concluding that stronger and more combative trade unions remain indispensable to any project of left-wing renewal, while also grasping that this will take forms that reflect changed realities.

Jane McAlevey’s contribution, meanwhile, is a compelling case study about union building among hospital workers, which shares important successes from which we can learn and be inspired, while also being soberly realistic about the limitations.

Wealth of material on social changes

Overall, this volume is a very worthwhile complement to last year’s first instalment in the journal’s project of analysing class society and class politics in today’s world. It simultaneously restates the centrality of class and traces the most important changes in work, class composition and the balance of forces between capital and labour. It is truly global, which is both a strength and a minor weakness: to my mind, it doesn’t have sufficient focus.

Some contributions are regrettably too academic in style, though others are fairly lucid. Above all, however, there is a wealth of material on concrete struggles, political debates and ways of organising, exemplifying the general commitment not only to class analysis but the role of the working class in social transformation.

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Debating the working class in the 21st century

Here's the video recording of a forum I spoke in alongside Guy Standing and Susan Newman at the Dangerous Times festival, held at the Richmix centre in east London in late June. The session was titled 'Hero to zero(hours)? The worker in the 21st century'.

My main contribution to debate is from 32 minutes until 43 minutes in. My summing up is from 1 hour and 9 minutes until 1 hour and 14 minutes in.

You can watch the video of the whole session here.


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Registering Class: neoliberalism and the working class

Chicago teachers strike back

This was written for the Counterfire website.

This year’s Socialist Register, marking fifty years of the intellectual journal, is about class. Part One of this review essay focused on two contributions to Registering Class that concern the nature and composition of today’s ruling class. This is Part Two of the review. Here I examine a number of essays which look at the working class: its changing composition and conditions, its forms of organisation, and debates about such issues as whether there is now a distinct ‘precariat’.

Precariousness as proletarianization

Bryan D. Palmer’s ‘Reconsiderations of class: precariousness as proletarianization’ is a highly effective rebuttal of claims, by Guy Standing and others, that there is now a distinct precariat which has increasingly come to supplant an older proletariat. However, this is not achieved by downplaying the tendencies to precarity and insecurity in neoliberal capitalism. These are acknowledged by Palmer as all-too-real. Rather, these tendencies are viewed as an integral part of an ongoing process in the composition of the working class, which is never static but always evolving and being re-made.

Palmer demonstrates that precarity has in fact historically been a core component of the making and re-making of the working class, not a novel or distinctive phenomenon, and is indeed one of the things that has defined and characterised what it means to be proletarian for two centuries. In the age of neoliberal capitalism this is a more global phenomenon than ever, and in the advanced capitalist countries there are neoliberal stresses and strains that mean a revival of those features, broadly termed precarity, associated with an earlier phase of capitalist development. The job security (‘a job for life’) and full employment of post-war Britain, as in most other major capitalist countries during the same period, was more the exception than the rule in capitalist society.

Since the mid-1970s the return of capitalist crisis, and the neoliberal offensive, has restructured the economy and recomposed the working class. Palmer writes that the consequences in the advanced West are ‘declining material standards of the working class as a whole; the domestication of a once combative trade unionism to a machinery of concession bargaining; a generation of young workers robbed of a sense of class place, its future marked by insecurity, with employment prospects understood to be precarious’ (p.41).

Precariousness is a global phenomenon. One point four billion workers are ‘totally dependent on waged labour for their subsistence’ but the International Labour Organization designates a larger number – 1.7 billion people – as ‘vulnerably employed’ (p.42). That is today’s global army of reserve labour. It is, as Palmer argues, part of the proletariat, not separate from it.

Palmer interrogates the fashionable arguments of Guy Standing, the latest commentator to posit an alternative force for social change to the working class. The precariat, asserts Standing, has ‘a distinctive bundle of insecurities and will have an equally distinctive set of demands’ (p.42). This separate youth-led precariat – the ‘new dangerous class’ – will be responsible for the social struggles of the coming age. Palmer responds that ‘the end result of being drawn into this ideology will be to fragment the potential power of an amalgamation of the dispossessed by hiving off a sector of this class from all other components with whom this contingent might ally, thereby weakening the forces of anti-capitalism’ (p.44).

Palmer traces the theorisation of a new ‘precariat’ as emerging from the postmodernism of the 1980s and beyond, which revelled in the fragmented and the marginal, repudiating any attempts to either understand the world as a totality or to change it through collective class struggle. He also restores a sense of broad historical perspective by reminding us that precarity has historically been a core feature of working-class experience. It is not the basis for some new class formation, but part of what characterises the current working class as a whole, after forty years of recurring capitalist crises and neoliberal policies, and as the working class expands globally along with capitalism.

The working class of western Europe was originally formed out of dispossession and characterised by insecurity of work. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was ‘a torrential river of class formation, fed by underground currents of enclosures, wars, technological displacements of handicraft labours and other forces of expropriation and displacement’ (p.47). This is the huge historical process charted by the great Marxist historian EP Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class.

As an aside, it is worth noting that Thompson’s writings, including The Making of the English Working Class, provide a key reference point in the penultimate essay in the volume, ‘Rethinking class: the lineage of Socialist Register’, in which Madeleine Davis traces Socialist Register’s theorising about class over half a century. Thompson’s masterpiece is still a touchstone for understanding the emergence of capitalism and the working class in this country, but it is also an exemplar of a way of conceptualising class formation as a contested and active process; an approach that has previously been a subject of debate in the journal’s pages, stretching back to the 1960s.

Palmer observes: ‘Class has always embodied differentiation, insecurity and precariousness’ (p.49). Thompson argued that, however stratified and differentiated the resulting working class might have been, it was nonetheless a single class with an identity of interests and the capacity to be, in Marx’s phrase, the gravedigger of capitalism. In analysing today’s working class (and its prospects for resistance and self-emancipation), it is necessary to understand its diversity and breadth: much of it, especially when we take a global perspective, is vulnerably employed, not in secure, full-time employment.

What about the prospects for class struggle and organisation in a stratified working class characterised by fragmentation and insecurity? Palmer cites what Engels wrote about the New Unionism in east London, around 1889-90, to indicate the potential for working-class layers once dismissed as precarious and unorganisable to become a collective social force. In a new 1892 Preface to his classic The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), Engels wrote of London’s East End:

‘That immense haunt of misery is no longer the stagnant pool of misery that it was six years ago. It has shaken off its torpid despair, has returned to life, and has become the home of what is called the “New Unionism” … that is to say the great mass of “unskilled” workers’ (p.54)

At times in history it has been unskilled, precarious or unorganised workers who have taken the lead in struggle; or even, as with the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement in the 1930s, the out-of-work. It may well be so again. Palmer concludes by stating that ‘it is indeed class struggle – rooted in expropriation and forged in the increasingly agitated crises of capitalism – that remains the ultimate basis for changing the world through a transformative politics’ (p.57).

Unions and the city

In many countries (nowhere more than in the US, but to a great extent in the UK too) trade unions have been severely weakened by over three decades of neoliberal offensive. Two essays in Registering Class engage with the question of how working-class organisation can be reconstituted in the wake of the largely successful neo-liberal counter-revolution. One of these, by Ian Macdonald, concerns efforts at union building in the US. The other, by Andrew Murray, examines Britain, not just for the prospects for trade union organisation but for the Left and, in the widest sense, the movement.

Macdonald’s essay is called ‘Beyond the labour of Sisyphus: unions and the city’. Intriguingly, Murray also deploys the Sisyphus analogy, which reminds us of the reversible nature of trade-union victories and the limits of union organisation. Macdonald’s concern is with labour organisation renewal in the United States, a country with private-sector union density at the shockingly low level of 6.9%.

Macdonald’s starting point is the nature of the resistance that already takes place:

‘A great many of the social struggles we see today – and are sure to see more of in the future – do not arise from the workplace or from the wage relation narrowly conceived. They are sparked by the destruction of a park, a rise in transit fares, racist policing strategies, and the dismantling of public education’ (p.247).

I take this to be a global observation as well as one that applies to the US – his four examples of triggers for revolt might be linked, in the last few years, to particular cases in Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, London and Chicago respectively.

This is nothing new. It was Rosa Luxemburg, in The Mass Strike (1906), who first cited the labours of Sisyphus as trade union metaphor. A key theme of her classic text was the fusing of political and economic issues in workers’ struggles. She noted that positive reforms won by trade-union struggles had often been counter-balanced by setbacks in spheres of working-class experience beyond the sectional focus of the unions. She bemoaned how ‘the simultaneous and immense reduction of the proletarian standard of life by land usury, by the whole tax and customs policy, by landlord rapacity which has increased house rents to such an exorbitant extent, in short, by all the objective tendencies of bourgeois policy which have largely neutralised the advantages of the fifteen years of trade-union struggle’ (p.248).

Luxemburg was commenting on a time of frequent trade-union victories. We now live in an age characterised by a sustained ruling-class offensive in the world of work, and of weak trade unions, as well as the kind of ‘bourgeois policy’ Luxemburg refers to in other aspects of working-class life. Macdonald urges a broad social and political trade unionism as the means to rebuild union power:

‘In order to shift the struggle from the economic to the political level – and to be at the political level – unions must mobilize their members and the broader working class around issues that link demands from the workplace to the nature of what is being produced and to social reproduction’ (p.249).

A political trade unionism is especially suited to a context characterised by weakness at the level of individual workplaces, and a lack of confidence among workers to take strike action. It can go a long way to compensating for such weaknesses and, in the process, begin to rebuild workplace confidence. In Britain it is worth recalling that the powerful and combative unions of the 1970s had been built on the back of full employment, boom conditions and sectional union strength in the post-war period. These conditions no longer apply, so the shape of trade unions is very different. A fresh strategy for trade-union renewal is needed.

Macdonald comments on community struggles over issues like social housing and public education, for example in Chicago, where there has been a neoliberal agenda of entrenching class and racial divisions and privileges. In Chicago it has been overwhelmingly schools attended almost entirely by African Americans that have been subjected to closure or ‘consolidation’. Urban space is often a battleground: ‘State-led gentrification constantly redistributes wealth upwards and expels workers outwards, only to then selectively reintegrate them ‘depending on the needs of production and consumption’ (p.252). Macdonald points out a number of campaigns, from Occupy Wall Street to Stop School Closings that address such issues as these, remarking that this is ‘where the real movement is’: in militant community campaigns, sometimes involving the occupation of public space, over day care, housing, libraries and education programmes.

Trade unions can play a part in these struggles, though they often do not. Such participation requires grasping that the issues affecting working-class people, including union members, are often outside the workplace. Unions are more effective when building coalitions and taking action in communities, and such campaigns outside the workplaces are frequently more fertile territory than inside the workplaces, precisely because of problems of low union density, insecurity of working conditions and a lack of recent militant traditions among workers. Trade unions can play a substantial role because, notwithstanding low density, they are still sizeable organisations with membership and finance, and they are organised.

Two concrete examples, noted by Macdonald, are worth mentioning here. Chicago teachers in 2012 had a successful city-wide strike, which rested upon building coalitions against school closures with parents, and on articulating a set of political arguments around class, race and inequality. Teachers and their allies repeatedly took to the streets as well as taking strike action. I am active in the National Union of Teachers (NUT) in Britain and I am aware that the Chicago example is a source of inspiration for some left activists in my union. The other example, again a source of inspiration for some socialist activists here, is that of fast-food workers’ unionisation campaigns in many American cities. These campaigns have involved community organising and street actions, feeding into greater workplace organisation.

Macdonald remarks that the unions are at their most successful and relevant when they assume ‘the mantle of popular tribune’. He concludes with these words:

‘The memberships of urban-based unions do not respect a separation between workplace and social needs when they look to union staff for help with landlords, accessing public assistance or any number of personal or family crises. The most active and conscious layers of the union membership do not respect these separations when they choose to direct their political activism as workers towards community struggles, rather than union politics. A labour left can be rebuilt by drawing these elements behind a clear strategic vision’ (p.261).

The future of the British labour movement

Andrew Murray’s essay, ‘Left unity or class unity? Working class politics in Britain’, is particularly excellent and, certainly from a British perspective, an invaluable part of the volume. An earlier version of it caused some considerable online debate and controversy due to its polemical critique of the nascent Left Unity organisational project. Although I share most of Murray’s criticisms of Left Unity, this is not in fact the most important feature of his essay.

Murray is justifiably gloomy about electoral politics for the British left, noting that ‘the post-Blair/Brown Labour Party is taking only the most timorous steps away from its luridly neoliberal past’ while ‘the left-of-Labour scene is a wilderness of wrecked or aborted initiatives’ (p.266). The medium-term alternative, in Murray’s view, is a focus on developing broad unity on major political and social issues, especially opposition to austerity. This is the ‘class unity’ he refers to in his title: essentially a project of re-building the trade unions, but on a rather different model to previous eras, and linking that project to the power of social movements.

The People’s Assembly Against Austerity – broad, combative and backed by major unions - is a signal case here. Indeed both the People’s Assembly and Unite Community, a major initiative by the union in which Murray is a senior national official, can be regarded as efforts to broaden the social and political reach of unions and link them to community campaigns, as advocated by Macdonald in the American context, in the process reinvigorating workers’ struggles and developing a stronger left labour (with a small ‘l’) politics.

Murray observes that on-going disenchantment with Labour co-exists with the Labour Party’s continuing domination of left-wing space in electoral politics: ‘Electorally, the space to the left of Labour is filled by … the Labour Party. That is, many people whose views are to the left of the Labour leadership still vote for the Labour Party’ (p.269).

A number of further factors militate against the growth of effective left-of-Labour electoral vehicles: the first-past-the-post system for many elections, which is hostile to smaller parties; the continuing allegiance of many trade unions to Labour (including Unite); the divisions on the Left among a range of competing initiatives; and, perhaps most importantly, the difficulties of mounting a challenge to Labour this side of the 2015 general election. As the official Opposition, Labour is a repository for anti-austerity sentiment, however feeble its own policies may be. Of course some of these conditions will change after the next election – and I think Murray may somewhat under-estimate this – but the essay is undoubtedly correct in its extremely sober assessment of the current prospects for ‘left unity’ in electoral politics.

The weight of Labourism in the British movement means that socialists outside Labour must, if they are to build a successful anti-cuts movement, work with the more left-wing elements of Labour and appeal to many of the party’s members and supporters. The other vital constituency for any anti-cuts movement is the trade unions: Murray acknowledges the profound long-term decay in union strength, but also highlights their continuing potential as mass organisations of the working class with around seven million members between them.

The unions’ response to austerity has been uneven and ultimately inadequate, but they have still provided the bulk of numbers for mass mobilisations like the huge national demonstrations in March 2011 and October 2012, and the co-ordinated national strikes of 2011 indicated of what they are capable.

Murray was Chair of the Stop the War Coalition for a decade and he, with much justification, draws on the record of the anti-war movement to suggest how the left can make itself relevant, and be renewed, through a focus on building a mass movement. He contrasts a Left which has been passive and abstentionist in response to a far-reaching economic crisis, and subsequently the imposition of austerity, with those elements of the Left that have proved non-sectarian and outward-looking, dedicated to broad unity and the reconstitution of a broad left-wing culture through meaningful joint activity. The experience of Stop the War suggests that the left can indeed play a dynamic leading role – politically, strategically, and organisationally – in a mass movement.

Murray regrets the marginalisation of the Left: the separation between most of the existing Left and ‘the working class it seeks to speak for’. He argues: ‘What left politics today lacks is that union of socialism with the mass movement which can be the only real foundation of social transformation’ (p.279). The People’s Assembly is one part of the solution; re-building the trade unions on a ‘social movement’ model, reflecting the working class as it really is, with a broad campaigning reach beyond the workplaces, is the other vital ingredient. He writes:

‘Reconstituting the labour movement so that it becomes a powerful expression of the working class interest, and thereby a means of the working class giving a lead to everyone interested in a new and better society, needs to be seen as the main task for socialists to address’ (p.280).

This question of working-class agency is a minor theme of the volume and could perhaps have been given greater prominence, although it may be developed in next year’s volume, but Murray provides a stimulating starting point by insisting that discussion of agency must be shaped by analysis of developments in the economy and the recomposition of the working class under the impact of neoliberalism. In mainstream political and academic discourses class remains unfashionable, but class struggle is positively taboo.

The potential, and the challenge, for the working class to become a serious collective actor in shaping the next stage of history seems an appropriate note on which to end. If class, however much the classes may be re-structured, remains as relevant as ever, as demonstrated by many of this volume’s essays, then class struggle, too, must remain a live subject.


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Revolutionaries, movements and class

Manchester, 29 September 2013. Photo: Mark Husmann

The revolutionary socialist tradition is characterised by commitment to the centrality of the working class to struggles for emancipation and to building a revolutionary party as an essential component of that struggle. But, according to a new article in International Socialism journal, the pressure of events has influenced successive waves of revolutionaries to succumb to movementism, which is marked by a rejection of these core ideas. This current political trend is reportedly a rightward-deviating break from the revolutionary tradition.

‘The politics of the crisis in the SWP’ – by leading Socialist Workers Party members Alex Callinicos and Charlie Kimber – includes a defence of the SWP leadership’s positions in recent internal party debates and of its handling of accusations of rape and sexual harassment against a leading member. However, it is also an attempt to locate the specific debates inside the SWP over the last year among larger social and political trends. The authors’ dominant idea is that the political tendency they call ‘movementism’ has pulled layers of revolutionaries away from the tradition.

A great deal has been written about the specific controversies in the SWP recently. The debate prompted by the Central Committee's response to allegations against Martin Smith, former SWP national secretary, is a tremendously important one in its own right. This article is not adding to the discussion about those particular issues - there are well-informed accounts elsewhere.

The SWP crisis has prompted some written commentary on wider political issues than those at the heart of the dispute. A common idea in much discussion is that what's gone wrong in the SWP has been a corrosion of democratic culture. This is true - the party's democratic culture has decayed badly. But we need to explain why that decay may have happened in relation to the organisation's actions in the outside world. Otherwise we are left with accounts of an inadequate democratic culture that can easily lapse into implying that any such attempts at building revolutionary organisation are doomed.

The long-term crisis of the SWP is not merely a crisis of democratic culture or of organisational form. It is a crisis of political strategy and orientation. This is important for anyone who wants to build more effective revolutionary organisation. We have to understand what has gone wrong in order to learn the right lessons. We mustn't throw the Leninist baby out with the SWP's dirty bathwater. The issues involved are fundamental to socialist strategy today and therefore require serious attention.  

Leninism, left reformism and movementism

The International Socialism article was pre-figured by a talk by Callinicos at Marxism 2013, which explicitly criticised Counterfire’s John Rees. Callinicos claimed that Rees had abandoned fundamental tenets of Marxism by supposedly emphasising protest movements and suggesting they are equivalent to strikes. In the International Socialism article, Callinicos and Kimber extend this criticism by claiming: ‘Counterfire has become little more than decorative coverage for the efforts by Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite, to rebuild the Labour left.’ (no reference or link is provided to support this particular claim, which in fact has no basis in reality).

The basis for the criticisms Callinicos made in July was a remark made at the People’s Assembly. This is what John Rees said in the closing session of the People’s Assembly:

“Some people want to say that there is one form of protest superior to all others, that direct action is superior to marching, that strikes are better than marching, that direct action is superior to strikes. Don’t be ridiculous! We need them all, we need every single one of them. We are going to need to break this government. And if we are going to break this government, we are going to need to demonstrate, to strike, to take direct action..."

Rees was moving the People’s Assembly declaration in this speech, which contained a series of practical priorities including the 29 September national demonstration at Tory conference, a day of civil disobedience on 5 November and the building of local People’s Assemblies alongside pledging practical solidarity with strike action against cuts. It isn’t clear which of these practical initiatives Callinicos regarded as unimportant and unworthy of a mention. And in fact the course of events has been as predicted: some highly successful local and regional People's Assemblies, a mass demonstration in Manchester, strike action accompanied by big regional street protests, and a day of direct action planned for 5 November which, not by accident, is now preceded by a CWU national strike the day before.

Leading UCU activist Sean Vernell appears to refute the narrow view offered by Callinicos when he writes:

'Too often the debate about the street versus the workplace is a sterile one with a false polarisation between the two. Socialists welcome all and any forms of protest against any aspect of injustice or poverty... Strikes and street protests are sometimes simplistically counterposed. However, both are going to be vital in defeating the government's offensive.'

Callinicos and Kimber argue that the trend of ‘movementism’ is shaped by a wider context characterised by widespread street protest coupled with low levels of strike action. Movementism and left reformism are viewed by the authors as two sides of the same coin: left reformism is focused on parliament and the Labour Party while movementism is concerned with street-based protest movements, but they are both given greater radical legitimacy by supposed ex-revolutionaries who reject revolutionary organisation and downplay the role of 'organised workers' in social change. This 'downplaying' is treated as synonymous with writing off the working class as a political actor.
  
'Movementism': the origins of a concept

The critique of 'movementism' involves identifying three linked characteristics: giving up the project of building a revolutionary party, rejecting the agency of the working class, and a commitment to movement building as a central priority. The term was first revived in 2008/09, as a way of justifying the SWP leadership's sharp turn away from the sort of united front building (Stop the War, Respect, anti-capitalism) that had characterised the previous period. A positive project of movement-building was swiftly turned into a negative trend of 'movementism', with lots of dark mutterings about the dangers of 'liquidationism' and 'dilution' of Marxist politics.

I will return to the current debate about 'movementism' below, but first let's consider where the concept comes from. It is a creature of the downturn for working-class struggle that began in the mid-1970s. The disorientation of the revolutionary left followed the ending of the international upturn in working class struggles in around 1975 - with the defeat of the Portuguese Revolution, Italy's 'historic compromise', Britain's 'social contract', the end of mass workers' unrest and so on. The end of the upturn was accompanied by a general shift to the right and a profound weakening of rank-and-file workers' organisation. This was complemented by the marginalisation of Marxist ideas (replaced, over time, with ideas labelled 'poststructuralist', 'postmodernist' etc) and a move into the Labour Party by former revolutionaries attracted by the rise of Bennism.

One aspect of this downturn was increasing emphasis on the role played by 'social movements'. This trend was regarded on the revolutionary left as a shift to the right because it downplayed class politics, wrote off any need for independent revolutionary organisation (deploying rhetoric about how 'Leninism' was dated, undemocratic and patriarchal), and paid little attention to trade union activity.

Criticising such 'movementism' did not mean neglecting the kind of issues that it tended to promote like gender, race and sexuality. It did mean having a distinct Marxist analysis of such issues combined with a practical approach that emphasised connections between oppressed groups and the working class movement. It also put the stress on mass activity, rather than elitist and separatist forms of action. The 'social movements' were not class-wide movements of protest but rather sectional campaigns which, though they didn't need to be, were often counterposed to a supposedly outdated class politics.

Having a critical stance towards 'movementism' was important for the revolutionary left: in a hostile climate, where there was considerable pressure from the right, it was necessary to maintain a distinctive Marxist pole and that often meant emphasising differences with others, while nonetheless working with others in joint political action. The critique of movementism was a historically specific critique that responded to a fashionable rejection of revolutionary organisation coupled with a downplaying of any emphasis on the working class as collective agent of social change.

Many SWP activists were involved in campaigning to defend abortion rights in the mid-1970s (indeed Lindsey German was a founder member of the National Abortion Campaign). The Anti Nazi League was launched in 1977 and formed a huge part of the party's activities until 1979. The SWP took the riots in Brixton and elsewhere very seriously (they were not a distraction from the 'class struggle'). The CND demonstrations of the early 1980s were important for the party, while the period also saw attempts to relate to fights over oppression.

There may have been a strong critique of 'movementism', but this was not a period of abstention from real-live movements. The critique of movementism was in fact quite precise: it was a critique of various forms of identity politics and their relationship to a drift by some from the revolutionary left into Labour Left politics. From the mid-1980s onwards the term almost completely disappeared from SWP discourse.

Building the revolutionary left in an age of mass movements

In the aftermath of the big Seattle anti-WTO protests of November/December 1999, there was a turn towards anti-capitalist organising by the SWP. This was particularly marked by mobilisations to the large-scale anti-capitalist protests in Prague, Genoa and elsewhere, participation in the World and European Social Forums, and by attempts to develop stronger networks domestically, e.g. a Globalise Resistance speaking tour in early 2001 drew turnouts that make it comparable to recent People's Assembly public rallies around the country.

A key element in this anti-capitalist work was an emphasis on winning trade union backing for initiatives - while more anarchist or autonomist elements in the movement tended to be dismissive of this - and articulating a resolutely anti-systemic politics against the movement's more moderate elements. Simultaneous to this growth of anti-capitalist activity, the SWP became centrally involved in important new electoral initiatives while continually endeavouring to link electoral work to broader efforts to build the left and the working class movement.

From September 2001 onwards the Stop the War Coalition gave fresh impetus to both the anti-capitalist networks and the electoral work: the former was reflected, for example, in the centrality of anti-imperialist politics to London's European Social Forum in October 2004, and the latter found expression in the emergence of Respect from the anti-war movement (in particular, but not limited to, the relationships developed with some Muslims who had not previously associated with the radical left).

None of this movement-building was an example of the kind of 'movementist' thinking which had previously been criticised. It reflected new opportunities which were opening up: the anti-capitalist and anti-war movements were an extremely welcome shift in our political direction and provided a vital new audience for us. The political movements of the last decade or so have been a response to three decades of a generalised ruling class re-structuring of the world, involving neoliberalism at home and, more recently, the new imperial offensive of the 'war on terror'. Callinicos and Kimber themselves provide a summary of the period which is similar to that which I have outlined, but they argue that the experience of building coalitions pulled a layer of revolutionaries away from the SWP’s traditional commitment to working class self-emancipation and the accompanying need for independent revolutionary organisation.

That is indeed a real danger. No doubt there have been individual examples of it happening. But it is a grossly inaccurate characterisation of many critics of the current SWP leadership, including those of us seeking to build a new revolutionary socialist organisation in the form of Counterfire. In fact the commitment to movement building reflects, as it has done for over a decade, two core understandings: in an era of political radicalisation and protest movements, revolutionaries can most effectively build their own organisation and spread their ideas by participating centrally in the movements; and, secondly, movement-building is not an alternative to the working class, but rather a particular expression of working class resistance and organisation. Trade unions remain hugely important and need to be an arena of political action for revolutionaries, but limiting ourselves to them would be foolish.

The emergence of the anti-capitalist and anti-war movements, against a backdrop of continuing low levels of industrial struggle, meant that working class resistance followed a very different pattern to the 1960s and 1970s, the era which had been the context for the growth of the International Socialists (forerunners of the SWP). It was also very different to the downturn of the 1980s, which had largely shaped the modern SWP. It was generally political and ideological issues which provided the cutting edge for resistance. SWP founder Tony Cliff, shortly before his death in 2000, grasped the new opportunities which were opening up and urged changes in how the SWP should operate, moving away from the more routinist and propagandist approaches necessary to survive the downturn years, turning the party outwards to embrace new developments (a number of those who worked most closely with Cliff in his later years are now involved in building Counterfire or Scotland's International Socialist Group).

This 'political upturn' was typically expressed in street protest, but it's important to recognise that this phenomenon was - and continues to be - reflected in the trade unions. Callinicos and Kimber make a passing reference to political trade unionism, but the SWP leadership has in fact forgotten the lessons learnt in the early years of this century. The political and ideological levels have still not been matched by a sustained rise in struggle in the workplaces. This fact has been largely ignored by the SWP leadership in the last few years, but it is something that fundamentally influences how revolutionaries ought to respond to austerity.

Industrial action cannot be seen in isolation from the political context and from developments in the wider labour movement. This is a general truth that finds particular resonance in the present period. In the last few years the biggest street demonstrations have been organised by the trade unions; the 26 March 2011 TUC national demonstration, involving half a million people, fuelled momentum towards the co-ordinated strikes on 30 June 2011 and, on a still larger scale, 30 November 2011. Those strike days involved the biggest local anti-cuts protests many areas have seen to date, with several hundred thousand people protesting nationwide on 30 November. 

The growing People's Assembly movement, the large and vibrant 29 September demo and Miliband's very hesitant leftward shift - itself a product of pressures from protests, trade unions and public opinion - have all given confidence to some trade unionists  to go for strike action. And when strike action happens its most visible expression is often in public protest, something we have seen this week with the strikes, marches and rallies by teachers.

The new popular revolts

Globally, recent years have been characterised by fresh popular revolts. There are many differences between - to take some high-profile examples – Tunisia and Egypt (at the highest level of revolution) and disparate examples ranging between Turkey, Brazil, Spain and the Occupy movement, but there are also some unifying characteristics. They have been centred on major cities and the main focus of resistance has tended to be the streets and the squares; occupations of public space and street protests have been central to the movement (though in Egypt, where popular struggle has reached higher levels than anywhere else, there has also been massive unrest outside the urban centres while strikes, throughout the country, have played an important role).

Young people have played a defining role, though these have not been primarily generational movements. They have been largely movements of the working class, but that means unorganised workers, unemployed people and often students as well as trade unionists (and where trade union members have been involved it hasn't necessarily been via their union).

A broad mix of ideas has emerged in discussions and debates, with a lack of ideological coherence or clear political leadership. This is a result of the relative historic decline of traditional social democracy (Labour and its equivalents elsewhere), the small scale of the revolutionary left and the intellectual marginalisation of Marxist ideas. The last few years in particular have - under pressure from capitalist crisis in its different forms - seen a marked growth in such movements. However, there has also been an absence of radical political leadership to help give them direction. Egypt's predicament - with mass demonstrations followed by the military taking advantage of the lack of popular political organisation and leadership in the movement to instigate a counter-revolution - is really a vivid, large-scale version of the strengths and weaknesses in many different centres of resistance.

The last few years have reminded us that mass strikes – while still a vitally important form of class struggle - are not in fact the only kind of mass working class struggle. Chartism was a mass working class movement but it was far from being only a strike movement. The Paris Commune wasn't mainly a struggle fought in the workplaces. Many other examples can be given.

In British history, even the high points of trade union struggle - including the New Unionism in the late 1880s, the Great Unrest before World War One and the explosion of strikes in 1919-21 - were shaped and characterised by forms of action that went beyond the limits of the unions. All of those phases of mass workers' struggle were preceded and accompanied by big protest movements over political and economic questions. Mass strikes themselves have always involved marches, protests, meetings and other forms of activity – and have never been centred solely in the workplaces. The class struggle operates, as Engels noted, in the ideological, political and economic dimensions. But it also operates through different forms. Economic grievances don't only find expression in strikes.

The poll tax, as Callinicos and Kimber observe, was a mass working class movement, but one that involved no strike action. In the Arab world, rises in food prices and the growth of graduate unemployment were big factors driving the revolts which began in Tunisia in December 2010. Public transport costs lit the fuse of revolt in Brazil. More generally, it is impossible to make sense of the wave of popular revolts and revolutions since 2008 - from Occupy to the indignados, from Greece to the Arab uprisings - without registering the impact of economic crisis. Directly economic issues often become enmeshed with 'political' problems like the role of police violence or the hollowing out of democracy.

Organised workers will be at the strategic centre of any successful revolutionary movement. This is one of the great lessons, still as relevant as ever, of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the wave of revolutionary upheavals which followed in its wake. Rebuilding trade unions - and workers 'confidence to take strike action - is a central priority. We are seeing signs of a growing spirit of resistance in the unions right now, including teachers', higher education workers' and firefighters' strikes this month and a national post workers' strike lined up for 4 November. But as well as winning arguments for strike action - and the projects of recruiting and workplace organising which are linked to such action - the process of rebuilding confidence also involves the development of wider movements of resistance.

Roots of the SWP crisis

The two turning points in the SWP's longer-term decay were the Respect split of November 2007 and the economic crash of September 2008. In the wake of these developments there was a sharp turn in the party's perspectives, which was strongly opposed by a small minority of us - who at the time were still members of the SWP, and who are mostly now in Counterfire or Scotland’s International Socialist Group. The Respect split and its aftermath led to a significant layer of cadre believing that a turn away from united front building, and towards a model of 'party building' familiar from the 1980s downturn, was necessary. By the time of the financial crash in autumn 2008 there was a mood for retrenchment, for strengthening a steady routine of branch meetings and paper sales at the expense of wider engagement with others in the movement.

This mood of retrenchment was strengthened after the Crash, when the majority of the party leadership rejected arguments for coalition-building responses to the crisis and instead advocated a narrower 'party building' response. There were arguments, for example, that selling Socialist Worker at workplaces was the main way we should respond to the crisis, or that the SWP - having argued for years that a return to economic crisis was imminent - could reap the rewards of being vindicated by recruiting directly to the party in large numbers, with less need for such mediating mechanisms as united fronts. Some of us rejected the new line, but we were in a minority. The minority’s arguments about strategy were underpinned by our recognition of broader changes. Here is how a Counterfire article from January of this year – on the SWP crisis – expressed it:

‘Underlying this conception, although not adequately formulated in Party debates at the end of the last decade, was a recognition that both the British working class had changed, and that our own forms of organisation needed to adapt with and to it. Trade unions were essential as the bedrock working class institution, but could not be the only game in town for socialists. Their recent strength has been in their contribution to movements of political protest, which include one day strikes, rather than in prolonged industrial action. None of this implies for an instant a retreat from the principle that the working class is the key agent of change in capitalist society. But as Engels noted the workers struggle exists in three registers: ideological, political and economic. In some periods the main form of struggle may be political and ideological rather than purely economic. To judge the state of the struggle simply by the level of strike action is to ignore the level of generalised, politicised anger and opposition that suffuses society today.’

The leadership resorted to vilification and personal attacks - and increasingly to disciplinary measures including expulsions - in order to defeat the minority. Many serious problems of internal culture witnessed in recent months are nothing new. They were also characteristic of the leadership’s approach to the internal debate in 2009 and early 2010:

‘Suspensions and expulsions preceded conference in January 2010, again with private online discussions used as a pretext. For the first time the CC used secret caucuses of its own supporters against the minority. This was the first time too someone was instructed to stop running a website. Email accounts were hacked to gain ‘evidence’ for expulsions. Students who disagreed were invited to leave the party before they were expelled.’

A politically weak leadership, having adopted the wrong approach, could only prosper if it caricatured the arguments of its internal opponents and ultimately drive us out of the organisation. By February 2010 it had become clear that the party was not going to change direction and that disciplinary measures were becoming a permanent substitute for open, reasoned debate. We split and founded Counterfire. The SWP drifted more and more towards a kind of soft syndicalism that overstated the likelihood of sustained co-ordinated strike action and remained trapped in trade union sectionalism, while downplaying the opportunities for broader political united fronts against austerity. This led to the formation of Unite the Resistance in 2011, a trade union network that rested upon rejecting the case for a broad anti-cuts coalition (and specifically upon hostility to the Coalition of Resistance, established the previous year) and instead stressed the important but narrower terrain of several public sector unions.

Counterfire activists had already worked with a range of others to establish the Coalition of Resistance, initiated in August 2010 with a very big launch conference a few months later. This aimed to connect trade unions to other anti-cuts constituencies, addressed a very wide range of issues under the umbrella of austerity, and embraced a range of methods (not just strikes but demonstrations and campaigns). We also sustained a central role in another genuine coalition addressing a set of major issues, namely Stop the War. More recently, the Coalition of Resistance has played a big part in developing the People's Assembly - precisely the kind of big, broad anti-cuts coalition that we have argued and fought for over time. Unlike CoR and the People's Charter, the SWP's Unite the Resistance has refused to operate within the People's Assembly and carry out anti-austerity activity within its framework.

The SWP leadership's errors of political strategy led on to further problems. In the course of driving through the new strategy from late 2008 onwards, it developed a culture of intolerance which has since become more entrenched. The party apparatus of full-time workers was used to enforce the leadership's will against dissenting voices, while the leadership has encouraged factionalism among a layer of loyalist cadre. The SWP developed greater sectarianism, as it was turning away from the kind of outward-looking attempts at building coalitions that characterised much of its history. Martin Smith, the party's national secretary until January 2011, was admired by many party activists for having spearheaded the new, post-Respect, perspective. It perhaps became difficult for anyone (in the national leadership or the wider party) to challenge his leading role, however troubling the emerging allegations about his behaviour may have been.

The current SWP crisis is thus part of something bigger and more long term; without this context it is impossible to understand how it could have happened in a party with such a strong historic record on women’s liberation and fighting oppression. It is also important to grasp the political context because otherwise we are reduced to misguided revisionism about ‘Leninism’, searching for a narrow organisational or internal solution while ignoring the wider political context. There are many very good socialist activists in the SWP, yet they are stuck in an organisation that sadly seems to be in permanent decline.

Arguments about united front strategy

Instead of a strategic focus on building united fronts against austerity, a combination of three things was deemed necessary by the SWP leadership from 2010 onwards: trade union work, narrow 'party fronts' (Right to Work, Unite the Resistance) and socialist propaganda about the capitalist crisis (embodied in party routines of branch meetings and paper sales). Trade union work and propaganda have very important roles, but are insufficient in themselves.

The rejection of a united front approach to the economic crisis was a serious mistake by the SWP leadership and the main issue of contention in the SWP faction fight of 2009/10 then the main cause of the successive splits which led to the formation of Counterfire in 2010 and Scotland’s International Socialist Group in 2011. Some SWP members are now involved in the People’s Assembly, which the party formally supports, but there is still a reluctance to fully commit to it in practice. This is reflected in the almost-total absence of references to the People’s Assembly from the Callinicos and Kimber article.

We have argued for five years that building a united front must be revolutionaries’ central strategic response to the crisis. The rejection of this by SWP leaders has been justified with three main arguments. Firstly, it has been argued that the way to defeat austerity is through strike action and therefore broad coalition-building is of secondary importance compared to work through the trade unions. Secondly – and this is closely linked – the tendency of union leaders to betray workers’ struggles has been regarded as a fatal flaw in any attempts to build an anti-cuts coalition that includes those very union leaders. Thirdly, the People’s Assembly is viewed with distrust and suspicion, as essentially a vehicle for a resurgent left reformism which a genuinely Leninist organisation must guard against.

These arguments are wrong. We need strikes to be bigger, more numerous and more co-ordinated. But simply calling for a general strike gets us no nearer to making it a reality. A great deal of resistance to cuts has been manifested outside the workplace and socialists need to take that seriously. We cannot substitute wishful thinking for attempts to advance the actually existing struggle by outlining practical next steps. A higher level of street protest and campaigning can help encourage greater confidence to strike. Even if there is a rise in strike action we will still need a range of tactics to confront the government, not least because protests can involve large numbers of people who are not organised in trade unions.

It is true that trade union leaders are unreliable allies, but united fronts are often built with unreliable allies. United fronts are somewhat unstable formations and there may be times when some forces have to take action independently of other forces in the united front. That tension is both inevitable and healthy. But there is also a more concrete point here: at a time when official union structures and the union bureaucracy are strong, relative to rank and file organisation, revolutionaries must work with those union leaders who are sympathetic to a broad coalition against austerity. A degree of agreement with those leaders is essential to building the movement successfully in the grassroots, thereby increasing confidence and the potential for independent action.

This particular criticism of the People’s Assembly is also strangely inconsistent. The SWP established Unite the Resistance explicitly on the model of the Communist Party-initiated Minority Movement in the 1920s, which involved creating a bloc with the trade union bureaucracy. So what we have here is that a united front is criticised for its links with the trade union bureaucracy by a party that is self-consciously modelling its operation on an organisation noted for that very characteristic. In practice the SWP vacillates between voluntarist actions like the storming, led by then national secretary Martin Smith, of the negotiations between British Airways and union representatives and trying (with very limited success) to develop links with some left-wing union leaders.

Finally, the charge that the People’s Assembly is providing a space for resurgent left reformism is an erroneous view. Many of those involved in the movement identify with one expression or another of left reformism. With a hurricane of cuts upon us, people look for shelter to protect them. A number of factors – the low level of strike action, the small scale of the revolutionary left, the marginalisation of Marxist ideas – mean that only a small minority look to revolutionary ideas and organisation, while left reformism fares somewhat better. This is no reason to neglect coalition building. Any coalition will contain different currents and there will be some political and ideological tension. Considering the balance of forces in the movement, abstention or a lukewarm approach from revolutionaries to broad coalitions is a recipe for sectarian irrelevance.

One symptom of the SWP's unwillingness to adopt a serious united front approach to opposing austerity is the increased recourse to shallow sloganeering. The party has repeatedly called for a general strike regardless of whether that has been plausible. It reflects a lack of a properly grounded analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the trade union struggle. The preoccupation with 'radical' position-taking, at the expense of practical strategy and tactics, also reflects the growing sectarianism: when a socialist group is not seriously working to influence events it becomes preoccupied with having the 'correct' abstract position and the defence of dogma.

Tony Cliff always insisted that revolutionaries must stare reality in the face and plot a course of action based on an accurate grasp of the balance of class forces. Over-optimism would only breed demoralisation, as socialists would be unprepared for any failure to turn grand expectations into reality. The overwhelming sense of disappointed expectations after some union leaders backtracked in the pensions dispute, a retreat that started in December 2011, did much to disorient the SWP. The SWP leadership had not prepared the organisation for such a turn for the worse - and this is a factor in the party's recent troubles.

The failure to develop an anti-austerity united front has been accompanied by a retreat from active participation in an anti-war united front. The recent victory over Syria - with Cameron forced to drop plans for British participation in a new war in the Middle East - vindicated the enduring commitment to Stop the War sustained by Counterfire activists, among others. The SWP, however, long ago withdrew from serious participation in local Stop the War groups, despite the party's outstanding role in initiating and building Stop the War - nationally and locally - from 2001 onwards. Very few SWP members are now involved in Stop the War and the party hardly ever promotes its events or distributes its materials. This retreat has been an integral part of the wider retreat from the 'political upturn' perspective established in the months and years after Seattle.

It has also been symptomatic of the SWP's move away from sustained commitment to united fronts as strategic priorities. Callinicos and Kimber emphasise the party's commendable role in campaigning against the bedroom tax, which is indeed an important issue, but the lack of long-term strategic commitment means a tendency to pick up and later drop issues. The same applies to questions of war: a sudden flurry of brief interest in response to specific events is no substitute for on-going practical commitment. We live in an era which requires long-term coalitions in response to austerity and war, not this sporadic and inconsistent approach.

Leninism, movements and the working class

What is falsely characterised as ‘movementism’ today is completely different from what was correctly referred to as ‘movementism’ in the radically different circumstances of the late 1970s and the 1980s. Revolutionary strategy which stresses the building of broad movements against austerity, racism and war is a strategy with class politics at its heart. It involves a commitment to using the strengths of the protest movements to reinvigorate the trade unions and, especially, to encourage confidence in workers to use strike action as well as other methods to challenge the government and employers.

This is, indeed, a key characteristic of the People’s Assembly, which emphasises a range of tactics and explicitly refers to strikes as an integral component of the fight to end austerity. This is precisely how socialists should be shaping a working class movement which also contains people who largely dismiss trade unions altogether and, conversely, people who are part of the union movement but reluctant to pursue the kind of mass co-ordinated strike action we need to win. This commitment to the People’s Assembly does not for a moment mean abandoning distinctively revolutionary organisation. The building of united fronts and the building of revolutionary organisation are mutually complementary poles. The fact that people have rejected one particular organisation does not mean they have rejected revolutionary organisation altogether.

Marxists in today’s world need political analysis of capitalism and the working class as they really are today, a strategy that reflects actual social forces, and ways of organising that connect with current forms of resistance and organisation. The defensive repetition of dogma and abstract truths is no substitute for this. At the core of Leninism is 'principled flexibility', a combination of Marxist principle with flexibility in tactics and organisational forms. This is linked to a kind of 'open marxism'. Rather than a closed system of doctrine, theory must be constantly evolving in interaction with political reality and the lived experience of class struggle.

Democracy is at the heart of the authentic Leninist tradition. It is essential for effective action. The centrality of democracy applies not only to our social and political struggles, but also to our own organisation. We need to recover authentic democratic centralism and recognise that the genuine Leninist commitment to internal democracy is radically different from the 'sect' form, in which an ossified dogmatic orthodoxy is seen as needing protection against challenge in democratic discussion.

It is essential we reassert the need for revolutionary organisation, unfashionable as it may be. The sectarian degeneration of the SWP has, unsurprisingly but mistakenly, encouraged a backlash against the Leninist tradition. The current trend is to promote 'loose networks' and 'decentralised organisation', yet experience shows that this generates its own problems of political incoherence, fragmentation and poor democratic accountability (problems I discussed in this article).

Reasserting democratic centralism does not mean importing wholesale the practices and structures of the pre-1917 Bolshevik Party (which, in any case, changed greatly over time and varied in different places). The essence of Leninism and the particular forms it can take need to be separated out. Crucially, what democratic centralism means in reality - how it is embodied in structures, procedures, practices - can be quite different for an organisation of modest size (like today's SWP) compared to one with a genuine mass base like the Bolsheviks.

The need for revolutionary organisation remains rooted in an understanding that real change has to be fought for through action from below. We cannot rely on either politicians or bureaucrats to change things for us, but must instead build broad, democratic coalitions of resistance. To make permanent gains and bring about radical social transformation, revolution will be necessary, in which the repressive state is replaced with a new order based on mass democratic assemblies. To this end we need an organisation of revolutionary socialists rooted in, and shaping, broader working class struggles.

We need to group together those who are consistently anti-capitalist and recognise the need for fundamental system change. This is the necessary complement to participation in broader social and political struggles. It is essential if revolutionaries want to make an impact on the world around them, rather than being reduced to either sectarian position-taking or, on the other hand, tailing more moderate elements in the broad labour movement.

The future of the revolutionary left

The SWP leadership has developed a narrow conception of class struggle that regardless of concrete circumstances privileges the call for strikes – despite actual strike levels being historically low –and downplays other forms of struggle, deriding them as ‘movementism’. This confuses a matter of principle, the centrality of the working class as the agent of change, with strategic and tactical assessments of which actions are possible at any given moment. This leads to ultra-left propagandism in practice and crude reductionism in theory. Sean Vernell expresses a more sophisticated view when he writes:

'Street protests of all kinds therefore must play a significant part in any real mass movement against austerity - not only because they can, given the right conditions, give confidence to workers to take strike action but also because they play a vital role in winning the battle of ideas within the working class against arguments justifying austerity. The question for the left should not be the street or the workplace but how we can inspire people to campaign and get involved with all types of campaigns to end austerity and for a different world.'

Paul Le Blanc responded to Callinicos’ criticism of Counterfire by noting that 'a majority of today’s working class finds itself outside of trade unions and participates in struggles, necessarily, through mass actions organised by social movements outside of the workplace... What is dismissed as “movementism” can be essential to the actual, real-life class struggle.’

There have been times in the past when the SWP made initial mis-judgements about what forms of action to prioritise. In the late 1970s it was only through experience that the party realised the Rank and File Movement was going nowhere but the Right to Work Campaign had great potential, necessarily correcting its perspective (which had previously regarded the rank and file union work as paramount, while work among the unemployed was a mere adjunct). In the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85 there was an initial over-estimation of potential for workers’ action, with a focus on calling for secondary strike action that quickly turned out to be less important than building practical solidarity campaigns in localities. When the poll tax was introduced in Scotland the party adopted the line of calling for strike action by those responsible for collecting and administering the new tax, while ignoring the emerging non-payment campaign. Thankfully the line changed when the poll tax was introduced in England and Wales.

In all three of these cases it was initially assumed that trade union struggle, especially through strikes and with a combative rank and file, would be the central means of advancing the movement. This rested on an over-estimation of union strength in the field of strikes - and in the last example, that of the poll tax, it also rested on an under-estimation of the potential for community action. In the 1990s a number of major struggles were expressed through street protests and campaigning. This was true of the big demonstrations against pit closures, Anti Nazi League's mobilisations and the movement against the Criminal Justice Bill. Later, in spring 1999, there were protests against Nato's war in Kosovo. The late 1990s also saw some indications of the anti-capitalist movement in the making, from the big protest against third world debt outside the G7 summit in Birmingham to the Carnival Against Capital in the City of London.

The examples I cited above were understandable errors, in the context of a generally correct wider perspective, and were remedied in time. Now it is different. The entire direction has been wrong since 2008. The SWP has failed to develop an anti-cuts strategy that reflects real political forces and the forms of resistance which currently pre-dominate. It is an approach that threatens to trap it in sectarian isolation. There is little evidence of re-thinking or positive change. That is, ultimately, what could doom it to terminal decline. All of its other problems – the crackdown on democracy and the recourse to disciplinary measures, the dogmatic propagandism, the endemic factionalism, the falling membership, the chronically weak leadership etc - need to be reckoned with in that context.

Paul Le Blanc recently argued that: 'While carrying on serious socialist educational efforts, we must be involved in mass social struggles in the here-and-now, most definitely for reforms. This should not be dismissed as “movementism” or as “left-reformism”… Such initiatives as, for example, the People’s Assembly should be embraced and whole-heartedly advanced. Efforts such as these are what can help to create the preconditions for a revolutionary party.’

The revolutionary left has to be part of shaping new working class struggles. Building a mass anti-austerity movement and expanding the influence and size of the revolutionary current within it are the two main challenges we face.

Some of this material has been posted previously in a different form on Luna17.


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