How the Far Left Got It’s Groove Back:
Lessons for the British Left.


1

Capitalism is a house of whores and pimps, and it’s never been cooler to say so. Only fifteen years ago, we’d have been obliged to meet the response that ‘really existing socialism’ was a house of torturers and trained assassins – which is true, so long as we reverse the meaning of that phrase, ‘really existing socialism’. Still, we are just escaping the crushing weight of Stalinism and at more or less the right moment – the anticapitalist purview is becoming a popular outlook across Europe, is sweeping governments in and out of power in Latin America, and is supplying the Palestinians with a hotbed of political support across the world. It arrived just as Indonesian workers and students had liberated themselves from Suharto (led by some unorthodox Marxists and trade unionists). It impacted upon the windows and shop-fronts of the City of London, that island of feudal capitalism on the banks of poverty-stricken East London, just a few months after NATO had liberated the Kosovans from their houses.
The accumulated energy of the anticapitalist movement seemed to break on the rock of 9/11, but that was as temporary as President Bush’s newfound leadership qualities. Gales of protest buffeted the US Enterprise as it interfered with the ancient civilisation of Babylon, assisted by the loyal Klingons in Downing Street. Trade union militancy has revived across the world, with the exception of the United States where the Bush administration took the opportunity afforded by 9/11 to smack the Longshoremen around. Elections in Germany, France, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, South Korea and even Britain in some measure have registered the dual tendency toward radicalisation and disengagement from parliamentary democracy – not as mutually supportive as they may seem.

In short, we’re back, and we’ve got a brand new bag.

2

I have to risk a Michael Winner impersonation at this point and say “Calm down, dears!” All of the above may be accurate, yet we still face some profound strategic conundrums and some almighty roadblocks. The crucial problems facing the Left in Britain are:
1. The absence of a national, mass political force to the left of Labour.
2. The absence of principled dissent within Labour.
3. The success of the far right in pockets of Britain reflecting an increase in racism generally.
4. The continued financial attachment of trade unions to Labour.
5. The increasing cost of beer.

Opinion polls reveal with terrible consistency a hardening antipathy toward asylum seekers and immigrants. This is compounded by a more direct and obvious racism toward Asian residents of the industrial North and Islamophobia, which is not entirely restricted to the right. This is the one issue on which the far right have been able to win an audience. Everything else they say which catches any resonance is drawn directly from the far left. The BNP have virtually zero support for their programmatic racism and antisemitism, and have consequently been forced to abandon the hardcore Holocaust revisionism and ‘fists and boots’ white nationalism of the early nineties and favour a more media friendly, politically correct racism. Their magazine is called ‘Identity’, which might have been the name of a postmodern publication in the Eighties. Nick Griffin’s justification for racial cleansing is that distinct cultures cannot co-exist, which is an extreme variant of multicultural discourse. But this has afforded them a space for growth. Their members are so depressingly thick that they have managed to lose many of their seats because of violence, while the remainder have been unable to fulfill their duties as councillors. But there are enough depressingly thick voters out there who will still support anything wrapped in a Union Jack.
Insofar as the far right feed off racism, we must double our energies against it. Insofar as they articulate a bastardised anticapitalist dynamic, we should articulate the real Armani.
The latter presents us with the remaining dillemas to which I now turn.


3

A lion walks into a bar in Islington, calmly perches himself on a stool and asks the barman in a low growl for “a pint of Best Bitter, please”. The barman, determined not to be thrown, puts on his professional smile and pours the pint. “Two pound eighty”, he says. The lion grumbles a bit, fumbles around in his fur, then finally paws over some change. After the lion has downed a few gulps, the barman can’t contain his curiosity any more. “Errr, it’s funny, you know, ‘cos … well, we don’t get too many lions in here.”
“I’m not fucking surprised at two pound eighty!” The lion snaps.
This must be how local Labour activists feel when they arrive at their annual Party Condescension to be sneered at, prodded and studied with anthropological curiosity by a leadership whom they nevertheless adore. Would that they had the courage to ‘Rise like lions’ as Shelley urged, but they’re too busy consuming some of Tony’s Best Bitter. If Tony was a lion-tamer, he’d be thinking “oh, where’s the fucking challenge in this? All I have to do is emote and they start weeping like incontinent bumholes”.
Given that Labour has neither the desire nor the ability to attract the kind fof young Lions capable of making their circus that bit more appealing, we shall have to look elsewhere. There is an enormous space on the Left, not presently occupied. Liberal opportunists occassionally usurp it for short term political gain, but they have also done their absolute best to make sure noone in the Tory seats think they’re left-wing. Why should this be? We have built a great movement, whose social weight resonates well beyond the borders of the Left. We have led in strikes and disputes, we have seen our preferred candidates win in union elections, we have given New Labour more than one bloody nose. And for all this, we have emerged without the ability to challenge new Labour electorally. We have little sustained presence in the mainstream media, and no money.

The answer must be to occupy that empty space on the electoral terrain, while not vacating the space for activism, which sustains us in between each electoral date. We need a new coalition of the left to fight Blair in those elections, and the proposals by George Monbiot and Salma Yaqoob are a great step in that direction. Those sniffing sectarians who think that it ain't good enough if it ain't Marxist need to extricate themselves now. Weekly Worker and Worker's Liberty have both, to their infinite shame, reacted strongly against these proposals for left unity. They insist on 'class politics not electoralism'. As if opposition to war wasn't the most profound kind of class politics. As if elections were nothing, and class politics not somehow reflected in them. As if we were somehow ditching the notions of class, and the classical conception of socialism, by participating in elections. Didn't Lenin once lead the Bolsheviks into participation in elections to the Duma, or did I dream that?

The Greens, on the other hand, are shitting themselves. They had assumed they would take the antiwar vote with their winning combination of blandness and sanctimony. They have said immediately that they want nothing to do with such an alliance, because most of its policies would be like Green policies anyway. Well! Good reason for you to be involved, he? Treble your membership overnight! But they were not as central to the antiwar movement as they could have been, and their television representative, Dr Caroline Lucas, was about as convincing as the Liberal Democrats in her arguments against the war. Therefore, let them huddle in their glass houses and throw stones.

4

Finally, if anyone doubts that a strong performance of the Left in elections terrifies the ruling elite, take a cop of this from the Independent:

"France faces a year of turbulent and possibly explosive politics after a tactical alliance was formed at the weekend between two parties of a resurgent far left ... In an opinion poll published yesterday, after two leading Trotskyist parties agreed to fight regional and European elections together next spring, 31 per cent of French people said that they would "consider" voting for the far left.

One of the parties, the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR), has doubled its membership in the past 18 months, as young French people, seduced by the anti-globalisation movement and cynical about conventional politics, flocked to the extremes.

So many new members have joined that the LCR has had to publish an A to Z of revolution, explaining, among other things, who Leon Trotsky was ...

The resurgence of the far left threatens to put the French political clock back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the strength of the Communist Party and other smaller left-wing formations prevented the emergence of a powerful movement of the centre-left. François Mitterrand, the former president, changed that by building the Parti Socialiste and persuading the Communists into a series ofalliances which ultimately withered their support among blue-collar workers...

Despite their success, the two principal Trotskyist parties do not even believe in democratic politics. They insist that change can only come through revolution.

Lutte Ouvrière is a secretive, sect-like organisation which appeals largely to disaffected blue-collar workers and revolutionary ideologues ..."


Like I told you, terrified!