Lenin vs McLeod: Round Two... posted by Richard Seymour

Okay, Ken, you can't expect me to take a kicking like that lying down. Let''s begin.

"There was rather more than one MP, a couple of trade union leaders, a film director, a liberal journalist, a Muslim antiwar activist and a few socialist sects behind the Labour Representation Committee."

A slight elision, Ken, since you know that the groups behind the LRC (ILP, SDF, Fabians etc) were in fact years in the making. Everyone has to start somewhere.

"In the second place - as the very name of the LRC reminds us - it was based on the painful discovery that the wage-earning class had independent interests of its own, interests which weren't to be subsumed, and couldn't be satisfied, within a coalition of progressive forces."

This point would be more persuasive if we were trying to make the Labour Party Mark II. We are not. We are uniting, or trying to unite, the forces of the antiwar left into an electoral coalition for the sole purpose of delivering a serious body-blow to the New Labour project. The allusion to Labour's formation was, obviously, an acknowledgment of the fact that we are compelled sometimes to take risks and make leaps. None of the parties in the coalition intend to dissolve. If anything, their unwillingness to be subsumed into the ever-feared "SWP-front" will doubtless reinforce party consciousness and loyalty. This is an electoral coalition, open-ended because we don't know where it can lead and how it will have to adapt.

"What does Respect represent, politically? A step back to the very 'unity coalition' that the LRC stepped away from: back to radical liberalism with trade union support, and away from the independent representation of labour."

No, it doesn't. Please be patient. I haven't eaten well, so perhaps I have somehow failed to make the point adequately enough - THE RESPECT COALITION IS NOT A NEW PARTY, AND IS NOT SEEKING TO RECREATE THE LABOUR PARTY. It is a coalition whose sole purpose is to give voice to the antiwar feeling - can we really afford to sacrafice that genuine anger to the Liberal Democrats and Chucky-Egg Kennedy? Can we afford to allow the Tories to cash in on Labour's crisis? Or shall we remain fixed like limpets to Good Ship Blair?

The latter it seems:

"Given the conduct and performance of the Labour Party for its entire existence, a reasonable case could be made for a new alternative at any point in the past hundred years. The question is how that can be done, and whether it can be done by posing as a mass electoral alternative to Labour."

Fair enough, but then Labour is at something of an historical nadir. It has leaked away its working class base, it is deliberately breaking its own links with the despised trade union movement, and eroding its own support with the most pointless policy stands. There is something to be said for the idea that, well, this moment is historically unique, that we have an opportunity to break New Labour from without.

"The SSP has achieved much, though not as much as it thinks. But Respect is doing something different. The SSP, whatever else may be said about it, stands openly and proudly for a democratic socialist transformation of society. Respect doesn't. That's why it could get the support of the honestly non-socialist liberal George Monbiot ..."

The SSP has achieved much that the Socialist Alliance could not. It was decided that the forces behind it were too narrow, that the immediate aim should be to force some electoral representation of the radical left, that this could be done by uniting socialists with other forces of the radical left. This seems eminently sensible to me. If Marxism can enjoin for some an undying commitment to support for the Labour Party, it can surely extend itself to left-unity in an electoral coalition.

"If you're going to stand against Labour, for heaven's sake at least stand on your own programme and measure the support for it, popularise it, get into arguments, try to change minds and stir things up a bit. That's what the SSP does. Don't trim your programme - don't argue against what you believe in - for the sake of imagined temporary popularity."

Stronger here. I wouldn't dream of arguing against what I believe in. Instead, I intend to argue for what I believe in. The point about the coalition is that it agrees a programme which all elements in it can argue for without disbelieving the words coming out of their own mouths. The programme is a perfectly good one, which no socialist could disagree with. It will be more radical than anything Labour have to offer at the next election. And we are emphatically not looking for "imagined temporary popularity". We are looking for a result. A victory. That's all. To break through the stultifying atmosphere of Blairite Britain in which only the BNP ever succeed in making successful politicising interventions. The Respect Coalition can do that. The Socialist Alliance could not.

"On your own account, a third or a quarter of even the heavily filtered Party conference votes against the leadership on key questions. And, to take up an aspect that you miss, the present Labour government has had more and bigger rebellions in its own ranks than any government for the past century and a half:

This government has seen the biggest MPs’ revolts since the mid-19th century. Two Labour MPs, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, are far more rebellious than any others, but by September 2003 thirty MPs had voted against the government on over half the contentious issues in parliament.

To compare: the 1964-66 Labour government had no parliamentary revolts at all in its first session. The 1945 government had only ten. The 1997 Blair government had 16. This 2001 Blair government had 76 in its first session, and had had 141 by the end of 2003.

And all this tells us that Labour will never again move to the left?"

My point was first of all that there is no indication from the membership that it intends to do anything to move Labour to the Left and secondly that even if it did, it would not result in substantive changes.

1) You note that "a third or a quarter of even the heavily filtered Party conference votes against the leadership on key questions"! A third or a quarter! There shouldn't even be that many voting with the government given its current state!

2) You note the number of parliamentary rebellions. But you don't note how pathetically, feebly tiny they have been. It took the largest mass movement in the history of this country to get Labour MPs to make a sizable rebellion against the government, and it still wasn't enough to get the job done!

3) Blair may go, but who will replace him? Is there a force within the Labour Party capable of challenging New Labour from the Left? Not likely. The solution proposed by most of the Labour membership is to replace Blair with Brown - from the man who waged the war to the man who paid for it.

"But even if it did move to the left, you 'remind' us, that would only help the right - the shift to the left in the 70s 'resulted in' the victory of the right in the Labour Party, and then by the Tories!"

In fact, that is a patent misrepresentation. I remind you that the Labour Party's turn to the Left resulted in a Labour government being elected which subsequently imposed the Social Contract. That contract cut huge swathes into wages for the first time since the war. It did so with the complicity of left trade union leaders. That government sent the army out to break a strike. That government slashed public spending and introduced monetarism. It produced the social decay and mass disappointment from which fascists were able to breed. And it gave in to racism, right down the line. Where the bloody hell is this magnificent left-wing Labour Party?

"The rest of the post deals with Bob Pitt's weary argument that we've seen it all before, and deals with it by saying that this time it's different.

That's what they say, every fucking time. "

That's a good point, as long as you omit the substance of my argument, which fortunately enough you do. The argument is that the circumstances today are different to what they were a few years ago, when the SLP and later the Socialist Alliance was founded. Qualitatively different. There is no longer any doubt about Blair, and certainly no doubt about the need for an alternative. That is what we are trying to provide. The essence of your argument is, "Don't try, ever, because it will never work". A little fatalistic, don't you think?