The task of Marxists is not to build a party with the politics of John McDonnell, Rebecca Long-Bailey and the other five left Labour MPs who defied Labour Party leader and Prime Minister Keir Starmer and voted for the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap, an act which got them suspended from the Labour whip.
What they did was good, and correct. But we know that their politics are a mild form of social democratic reformism – a variant of Corbynism. That is not what is needed to confront, challenge and defeat the capitalist system which enforces poverty and degradation on the working class.
We need a real socialist party, a real communist party. (What it is called is less Important than what it stands for, i.e, what its programme is.)
The programme we need must state clearly that the party stands for a complete break with the capitalist profit system, for the extension of real democracy into every aspect of life, including the economy. That means the expropriation of the capitalist class.
Such a party would obviously relate to and work with any and all others on an episodic basis to fight for reforms and to resist further atttacks but it cannot subordinate its programme to the limitations of social democratic reformism.
Therefore we should not look to McDonnell, or Jeremy Corbyn or Andrew Feinstein or similar to lead us.
We Marxists must take a bold initiative and come together to create the basis for a new united socialist/communist party.
It would be small at first but it would grow. If we always tail others with their different and limited politics we will never build the vehicle – the party – we need to change society.
Those who agree with this should come together to discuss how to go about doing this.
We in Talking About Socialism … from a Marxist Point of View are committed to working with others to bring about the new working-class party we need – completely committed to the defeat of capitalism and the establishment of a new society based on democracy and common ownership, with production planned for the needs of all, not to produce profit for the few.
The simple truth that we need a mass Marxist or Socialist Party is often obscured and ignored by Socialists who imagine the Parliamentary Labour Party can be transformed into a Socialist party or a party that can represent the fundamental interests of the working class. A crude example of this misguided approach is Left Horizons. Their latest editorial is full of dogmatic bombast. It is not the seven labour MPS who have had the whip withdrawn until they toe the right -wing line on the two child cap, but Starmer and the mass ranks of his parliamentary army who are politically Isolated. These seven are merely the harbinger of a massive opposition developing within the Labour party. The sign of a titanic struggle between left and right which will split the Labour Party between those who represent the fundamental interests of the workers and those who represent the stabilisation of Capitalism. All this is delusional. Its the figment of dogmatic minds clinging to old abstract schema’s that were never realistic in the first place. We know who are the advocates of Capitalism, the new and old Blairites ,but who are the mass ranks of defenders of the fundamental interests of the working class in the Labour Party? There is no realist assessment of the Labour left. John McDonnell put unity with Starmer and the right-wing before the membership of the Labour party and helped facilitate Starmer’s purge of the left. There is no fatalistic objective movement of history, no hidden-hand, working to transform the parliamentary Labour Party. The political reality is simple, we need Marxist unity on fundamental policies and actions to represent the interests of the working class
So, Nick, Socialist Party, Socialist Appeal (RCP) International Socialist Alternative, Workers Weekly supporters, Socialist Workers Party (I’m sure I’ve missed some) should call a conference and come together under one programme. The likes of MCDonnell can come to us. It gives everyone clarity. I like it. What’s stopped it happening before now?
My view is that there are many people in these groups who would welcome such a development – very much like the launch of the Socialist Alliance was welcomed 25 years ago, although while named socialist it did not have a socialist programme per se. The problem is that none of the people leading these groups are prepared to give up their position, standing atop their hill of beans, to make a bigger hill or even a mountain that might have some impact. We have a gridlock, much like before the miners strike and the poll tax exploded the Marxists left into the fragments we see today.
At the same time I reckon that the vast majority of Marxists exist outside of the organised Marxist groupings that you mention. The older generation, being older and wiser – will not accept undemocratic norms, heritage leaders or the like. The younger generations will not tolerate any lack of democratic norms, used to a freedom of opinion generated by the internet. Those of both generations who do accept these things are a minority.
For me, this means that you build connections between the non-aligned Marxists who see the need for a mass democratic and socialist party with a programme that reflects that and are prepared to work towards it. A pre-party formation is the first step. We have to put a new planet in the firmament that puts the question of a new mass party of this type and has the gravitation pull to make it a question the existing groups and aligned Marxists cannot ignore. It has to first disrupt the present eco-system of the far left and then create a regroupment of those who do not wish to repeat the very many mistakes of the last 40 years. It has to have enough weight to prevent what happened to the Socialist Alliance happening again, being split by the SP on the one hand and then the SWP on the other in less than two years, and to overcome the desire to recreate ghosts of the past wished by some left groups, whether that be the formation of the Labour Party in Britain or the imagined formation of the Bolsheviks.
Nick
There already is an orthodox and non-reformist Marxian Socialist Party in the form of the Socialist Party of Great Britain which has been around for quite a while.
https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/who-we-are/
I don’t quite see the point in starting up another one
Hi Rob. The SPGB does have its own history but has also been very unsuccessful since I first ran into them in 1982 at university. To me then, and now, it looked like an object that got trapped in time. They are not the only group to have done this though.
100 years of being utterly ineffectual is a good example of what not to do