I won't pretend.  I never believed for a second that George Galloway would win the Bradford West bye-election for the Respect Party, much less that he would win with more than 50% of the vote and a majority of more than 10,000 votes, that the coalition vote would simultaneously collapse (the Liberals lost their deposit) and that all this would happen on a turnout of over 50% (very high for a bye-election).  

For me it opens up many strategic questions for the Left.  Because Galloway seemingly didn't have a huge amount in his favour.  He didn't have a lot of money or a powerful local machine.  He didn't have a sympathetic media establishment.  He didn't have the support of the mosques in Muslim areas, who overwhelmingly backed Labour.  The Respect Party for which he stood is not a well-oiled national organization, able to mobilise activists at short notice.  One thing he did have in his favour was his renown, but that has obvious drawbacks, and there were many, many Labour big-hitters flooding the constituency - including the Labour leader himself.  So, this result is extraordinary and demands explanation.  Both Labour and Tory pundits have colluded in a set of bilious talking points: here comes George Galloway 'stirring up tensions' again, he's going to divide the left vote and let the Conservative in, Big Brother cat impersonator, vain cigar-chomper, doesn't care about the real issues that affect this community, meow, go back to Talksport, indefatigability, fundamentalism, demagogue, Armani suit-wearing attention-scrounger, oil-dealing reprobate, hilarious, sinister, Pat Mustard, etc etc. Even Patrick Wintour of The Guardian participated in some of the worst of this, in a frazzled early morning report which repellently suggested that Galloway won by mobilising the "Muslim immigrant" population around a "fundamentalist call" to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and fight job losses.  I gather that the offending statements were removed from the article this morning.

We can dispense with these morality tales at once.  Anyone trivial enough to be obsessed with them can find many blogs that cater to that particular fancy.  There are even blogs who supported the Labour candidate who will have the cheek to talk about 'communalism', which (if you accept this highly problematic terminology) is arguably one of the things that was defeated in Bradford yesterday.  We can also do without the liberal lament ("how-dare-George-Galloway-win-an-election", and "he's-ruining-it!").  The most laughable retort came from a Labour politician who suggested that Galloway had won because of his Big Brother celebrity.  If he'd lost, that hardly luminous moment in his career would probably have been cited as a cause.  We can drop that stupidity as well.  Nor do I want to argue the toss with those on the Left who have allowed otherwise sensible disagreements with Galloway to obscure what is most important about this campaign - which is that its victory is a step forward for the Left, and particularly for the working class constituencies in Bradford West affected by racism, unemployment and cuts.  I simply take it as read that anyone on the Left with a sense of proportion will welcome this result, and move on.

The major strategic question that the result raises is how the Left relates to Labour in this period.  If it was wrong to underestimate the ability of social democracy to revive itself in opposition, it is evidently just as mistaken to underestimate the real weakness of Labour.  The fact that Ed Miliband has been aware of the secular degeneration of Labour's base, and seemed to have some vague idea of addressing the problem, doesn't mean that that he has been empowered to do anything.  Nor does it mean that his solutions have been anything but feeble.  Miliband's solutions appear to be predicated on the idea that Labour's problems in its previously formidable working class strongholds are mainly organizational.  That is, they can be resolved by incorporating a passive membership base, further reducing union influence and somehow 'reconnecting' with the 'grassroots'.  Either that, or they require better 'communication'.  Ideologically, his leadership is weak and prevaricating.  The thematic of the 'squeezed middle' interests few and excites no one, while the moronic Blue Labour guff turned out to be deeply damaging.  Politically, his leadership has worked to dampen and contain resistance to the cuts within the labour movement.  This is in some ways just the classic mediating function of social democracy - don't struggle, just vote for us and we will bargain a better deal for you.  But when this mediating function is captive to the logic of neoliberalism, the practical difference that Labour can offer is woefully inadequate.

Harriet Harman, who is far from the worst in Labour's leadership, showed the paucity of Labour's analysis when she insisted that 1) this result in Bradford a purely regional phenomenon, with no wider ramifications, and 2) this has nothing to do with Labour's failure to oppose, since "We've had a completely different argument from the Tories, arguing that they are cutting too far, too fast."  The latter, of course, is not "a completely different argument".  It is an argument which accepts the principle of austerity; which is to say, it is an argument which accepts that working class people have to put up with a generation being lost to joblessness, with tuition fees, privatization, service cuts, benefit cuts, and the evisceration of local infrastructure.  The real problem is that Labour has no sense of how to oppose the coalition, because it has preemptively conceded most of the territory.  This is because Labour's leadership knows that if the party wins a general election, they have no intention whatever of adopting a fundamentally different course or of significantly reversing anything the Tories now implement.

And of course, it isn't just Bradford West.  There were regionally specific factors assisting Galloway's victory, above all the local hatred for the managerial, machine politics of the Labour establishment.  But that machine has been in place for a long time.  Nor is it just a question of Muslim voters being disaffected with Labour.  The fact that some of the poorest and most oppressed workers in the UK have also been most willing to vote for left-wing candidates shouldn't even raise an eyebrow.  It is obvious, or at least it should be to marxists.  If it was only Muslims who could be reached on such an agenda, that might be a cause for concern, but Galloway gained more than 50% of the vote by mobilising a multiracial coalition.  This was a working class vote for a left-wing mandate.  It reflects not just polarization over austerity, a generational transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich, but also Labour's thus far hapless response.  The landslide for the SNP and Scottish Labour's ongoing problems, particularly in Glasgow, discloses essentially the same dynamic.  It has yet to be tested, but I think Plaid Cymru's new left-wing leadership could seriously strain Labour's presence in Wales.  And the Greens' Brighton victory in 2010 shows that wherever there is a serious left-of-Labour challenger, Labour has something to worry about.  Galloway had it right in his victory speech: Labour "must stop imagining that working people and poor people have no option but to support them if they hate the Tory and Liberal Democrat coalition partners."  

Of course this opens a space, no more than that, for some sort of left-of-Labour formation.  We should not be thinking purely or even mainly in electoral terms.  Labour's crisis is part of an organic crisis which is engulfing all the parties, and which is changing the relationship between those parties and their social base.  It is not just a question of masses fleeing from old banners and flocking under new banners.  Those parties which temporarily gain from social democracy's paralysis and breakdown only to emulate the social democrats in their basic mode of organization, often find themselves implicated in the same processes of breakdown.  What this crisis is doing is raising the question of new modes of organization, new ways in which masses relate to parties.  We know, for example, that there are going to be intense social struggles in the next few years, and orienting properly to those is even more important than exploiting electoral openings.  A formation of the militant, anti-cuts left is surely a reasonable goal in these circumstances.  

There's another reason why it is important to recognise and act on this opportunity now.  The question of austerity was never going to be resolved solely at the level of industrial conflict.  The lesson of austerity is precisely that it is at the level of politics that "that the contradictions of the economy are concentrated and that their ultimate resolution is decided."  In fact, even industrial struggles aren't won or lost purely at the level of industrial conflict.  Their success is partially contingent on the political 'line' that is won in those struggles, which depends on having a wider network of militants and activists plugged into every form of resistance, drawing and sharing lessons across the different fields of struggle, helping to overcome weakness and unevenness and resist the tendency of the union bureaucracy, particularly its Labour-affiliated right-wing, to retreat.  That requires a degree of coordination and unity on the militant left that has thus far been lacking.  More generally, the struggle against the cuts requires some degree of coordination between different levels and types of activity, and some form of organization that can negotiate a shift from one locus of struggle to another, as events progress.  We have already seen that things can look very bleak in the trade unions, then a student protest comes along and changes the whole calculus.  Likewise, a string of occupations can be winding down, only for a mass TUC-led anti-cuts protest to re-ignite the whole question.  Or, the situation can suddenly be radically re-polarized by a series of riots, and the presence or absence of a left with some weight can make all the difference.  And so on, and so on.  The fact is that 'austerity' is so comprehensive in its targets that its effects are likely to appear in aleatory and unpredictable ways at various points of antagonism.  Negotiating between and unifying these struggles is a strategic imperative, which is why I previously argued that the competing anti-cuts vessels of the Left should merge into a single flotilla.  I would now say there is space for a political organization which is more cohesive and ambitious in its objective; not a re-make of past models, nor a revamp of existing ones, but a new formation which quite deliberately sets out to organize and reconstitute those segments of the working class that are now well to the left of official Labourism.

The main obstacle to achieving something here is not the tenacity of Labourism so much as the weakness of the organized left at this stage.  But unlike the former, we can do something about the latter.  We can certainly solve any problems of organization that have dogged us in the past, provided we acknowledge them.  That's why the ostrich-like response of the monomaniacs who can only see Galloway's flaws, and only see the result as a victory for a vanity campaign, is particularly irresponsible.  It is a moralistic abdication of the duty to engage in a concrete analysis of concrete situations, to think through the strategic possibilities, to calculate the relative gains and risks of the courses that are now open to us.   As I see it, the onus is on the Left to act on this opportunity.

About three quarters of a million workers took strike action on 30th June. This wasn't as big as some strikes in recent years, and certainly nothing close to the 'winter of discontent' evoked by the right-wing press. But I think it was far more important than the previous ones of the last decade, because it was a) far more political, b) not simply a sectional strike over conditions, and c) rooted in certain grassroots responses to austerity. It followed from a mass demonstration in London that was a concentrated manifestation of the working class in this country, representing far more than just the trade unionists present. At a big building meeting for the strike in the week before it happened, there was a wide variety of trade unions, parties and campaigning groups present. You can watch some of the videos from the event here. Here's a list of the groups represented:

Action for ESOL. Black Activists Rising Against Cuts (BARAC), Brent Fightback, Camden Keep Our NHS Public, Camden United Against the Cuts, Central London Right to Work, Coalition of Resistance (CoR), CWU London Region, CWU North/North West London, Day-mer (Turkish and Kurdish Community Centre), Defend the Right to Protest, Disabled People Against the Cuts (DPAC), Ealing Alliance for Public Services, Education Activist Network, Hackney Pensioners Group, Hands Off Our NHS, Islington Disabled People Against the Cuts, Islington Hands Off Our Public Services (IHOOPS), Keep Our NHS Public, National Shop Stewards Network (NSSN), NUJ London Magazine, NUT Camden, NUT Croydon, NUT Ealing, NUT East London Teachers Association, NUT Hackney, NUT Islington, NUT Islington 6th Form College, NUT Newham, NUT Southwark, NUT Wellington Park Primary School, PCS Central London Valuation , PCS DWP North London, PCS Euston Towers, PCS LPS London & South branch, PCS Office of the Public Guardian, Queer Resistance, Right to Work (RtW), RMT Eurostar, RMT Fleet branch, Southwark Save Our Services, TUC Barnet, TUC Greenwich & Bexley, TUC Haringey, TUC Slough, TUC Waltham Forest, UCU City & Islington College, UCU City of Westminster, UCU Conel, UCU Greenwich Community College, UCU Hackney, UCU Kings College, UCU Lambeth College, UCU Left, UCU Lewisham, UCU London Metropolitan, UCU London Region, UCU Richmond College, UCU South Bank University , UCU Tower Hamlets, UCU Westminster Kingsway, UK Uncut, Unison Camden, Unison Haringey, Unison LFEPA, Unison Tower Hamlets, Unison United Left.

I'm not bigging up diversity for the sake of it. Many of these groups would overlap in terms of their activists and politics, and anyway I don't suppose every group has the same social weight. But the point is that among these are groups that really need to work together, as well as some that aren't rooted in the labour movement but have nonetheless understood the importance of supporting it - just as the student movement has. Take UK Uncut, for example. It's contribution to the strike was a simple gesture of solidarity: they brought breakfast to striking workers on the picket lines. In a previous post, I argued that UK Uncut's major contribution so far had been to shift the field of signification, forcing a different kind of discussion about tax and spending into the mainstream media. This is doing a bit more than that, I would venture - it's building relationships between anti-cuts activists who aren't necessarily unionised and trade union activists whom the media try to pick on and single out as some sort of gluttonous alien presence within an abstemious, belt-tightening society.

Of course it isn't only UK Uncut that are doing this sort of thing, but it's an imaginative intervention. Such relationships need to be expanded and deepened. There will be more strikes. There needs to be a lot more industrial action if this government is to be defeated. And when that happens, communities of activists able to back up the strikers, counter the propaganda, raise funds, connect their strikes to wider political objectives, etc., will be essential. So, 30th June was an excellent start. And there will be a series of political campaigns between now and the next wave of strikes in Autumn - the campaign to save the NHS now being launched, for example, as well as the demonstrations outside Tory and Liberal conferences, which should be big - to keep the momentum going. Moreover, there will be furious debates in those unions such as the GMB, Unison, and Unite, which didn't participate in these strikes. The Labour leadership has made it very clear that it is opposing any strike action while negotiations are ongoing (even though, as Francis Maude made abundantly clear in his floundering BBC Radio 4 interview on the day of the strike, the government isn't actually negotiating on the main issues). I expect that this is part of the reason why the union leadership that is closest to the Labour leadership has felt compelled to sit the recent strike waves out. So, rather sooner than I expected, the anti-cuts movement is posing a hard question for the labour movement. Ed Miliband has signalled that he wants to reduce union influence in the Labour Party, and is broadly tilting toward the right, particularly the 'Blue Labour' types. The question now is whether the unions closest to Labour will act independently, or waste their energies trying to buttress a weak leadership for fear of something worse following him. Similarly, the CWU now faces the question of whether it will support strike action to stop the closure of mail centres in London, which are known to be militant strongholds being targeted to facilitate privatization. But there's more to it than this.

I argued before that a precondition of the success of anti-cuts movements was 1) a plausible, popular explanation of the crisis, 2) a set of solutions based on that explanation (an alternative economic strategy), 3) a unified political movement capable of taking those arguments to a wider public. I would pose this in opposition to what might loosely be termed 'syndicalist' responses to the cuts. These would involve the idea that 'struggle' alone is a sufficient basis for action, and that such 'struggle' can be conducted independently of the existing mass parties and unions, almost without reference to fixed political norms or concepts. Perhaps that doesn't seem to be a pressing danger. But syndicalism arises historically where the extant labour bureaucracies and associated reformist parties have become too invested in the current bargaining system to really fight for the interests of workers. I'm not really convinced we're at that stage with the trade unions, but in countries where reformist parties are in power, and implementing cuts, and doing so with the acquiescence of union leaders, such tendencies have already manifested themselves in one form or another. I can well see it becoming a tendency here among younger, unorganised activists.

But David McNally raised a different kind of issue in his talk on new socialisms, specifically with reference to Bolivia and Egypt. It was the issue of how to build a popular labour-based response to neoliberalism in a context in which traditional unionism is either in serious difficulty or has been repressed by the state. In Bolivia, elements of the labour movement recognised that workplaces in the neoliberal era were becoming very different to traditional mass production outlets, and as such unions were finding it harder to organise. Not only that, of course. The Bolivian working class also had to contend with imperialism in the form of the IMF and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA, now happily replaced with ALBA). The production centres were smaller, more geographically scattered, and were more difficult to reach. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the most class conscious sector of workers in the Americas was subject to continual erosion so that by the end of the 1990s, the organised working class represented just a fifth of the total urban working class. As a result, some activists turned toward outreach work, setting up stalls in town and city centres, inviting people to join unions. (For what it's worth, this part of McNally's analysis comes straight from Jeffrey Webber's book From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia, which is thus far the best guide to the subject of the country's leftist turn since Cochabamba). The result was the leftist upsurge that resulted in a near revolutionary situation in 2005, followed by the election of Evo Morales.

A huge problem facing organisers in this country is the depletion of the density not only of the trade union movement, but also its militant rank and file. Martin Smith discusses these tendencies in his recent article on the trade union movement in the UK:

The decline of union reps over the last 25 years is worrying, but it is explainable. In 1970 there were around 200,000 stewards in Britain; by 1984 they had reached the 335,000 mark. This dramatic increase was due to the rising levels of militancy and the growth of trade unionism in the white-collar sectors—local government, civil service and health. There then followed a sharp fall in union membership and an even bigger fall in the number of shop stewards. As Ralph Darlington points out, recent estimates vary considerably: some believe that the number of stewards in 2004 was around 100,000, others as high as 200,000. Whatever the truth, it is a serious decline and one rooted in the defeat of key sections of the working class in the 1980s and the decline in industries with strong union representation.

The problem therefore is not wholly dissimilar to that in Bolivia, as a combination of defeats and the re-composition of the class has left the organised core of the working class slump to less than a third. Is there a case for an outreach campaign here? Surely there is. It would make perfect sense for the unions to be engaging in a mass recruitment drive on the basis of resisting the attack on working class communities. Organising and reaching into new workplaces would solve a number of problems. It would it do what mergers and so on have failed to do, in halting the decline in union density. It would help overcome the division that the Tories and Liberals are trying to create between public and private sector workers. And it would also be an important chance to articulate the union's case to members of the public well beyond those who attend organising meetings or protests. Ideally, such drives would involve the full range of anti-cuts bodies and activists. That, I think, would be an appropriate merger between the indignados and rank and file militants of the UK.